Appendix E Wireless LANs

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 46 Wireless Security Levels

SECURITY

SECURITY TYPE

LEVEL

 

Least

Unique SSID (Default)

Secure

 

Unique SSID with Hide SSID Enabled

 

 

 

MAC Address Filtering

 

 

 

WEP Encryption

 

 

 

IEEE802.1x EAP with RADIUS Server Authentication

 

 

 

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)

Most Secure

 

WPA2

 

 

"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.

RADIUS

RADIUS is based on a client-server model that supports authentication, authorization and accounting. The access point is the client and the server is the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server handles the following tasks:

•Authentication

Determines the identity of the users.

•Authorization

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PLA-450 User’s Guide