P-661H/HW Series User’s Guide

Wireless Security Overview

Wireless security is vital to your network to protect wireless communication between wireless clients, access points and the wired network.

Wireless security methods available on the ZyXEL Device are data encryption, wireless client authentication, restricting access by device MAC address and hiding the ZyXEL Device identity.

The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security methods available on your ZyXEL Device.

Table 165 Wireless Security Levels

Security Level

Security Type

Least Secure

Unique SSID (Default)

 

 

 

Unique SSID with Hide SSID Enabled

 

 

 

MAC Address Filtering

 

 

 

WEP Encryption

 

 

 

IEEE802.1x EAP with RADIUS Server Authentication

 

 

Most Secure

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)

 

WPA2

 

 

 

Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the ZyXEL Device and on all wireless clients that you want to associate with it.

IEEE 802.1x

In June 2001, the IEEE 802.1x standard was designed to extend the features of IEEE 802.11 to support extended authentication as well as providing additional accounting and control features. It is supported by Windows XP and a number of network devices. Some advantages of IEEE 802.1x are:

•User based identification that allows for roaming.

•Support for RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service, RFC 2138, 2139) for centralized user profile and accounting management on a network RADIUS server.

•Support for EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol, RFC 2486) that allows additional authentication methods to be deployed with no changes to the access point or the wireless clients.

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Appendix K