How Secure Is Your Wireless Network? Safeguarding Your Wi-Fi LAN [Book Review]

explanation of wireless technology. It helps the uninitiated grasp the concepts of wireless network technology, IEEE 802.11’s technical and security issues, and some of the core community’s more arcane practices, such as “war driving.” This term comes from the hobby of searching for wireless networks by moving around a city, or even a building, scanning for wireless network transmissions. The book provides a broad overview of the wireless networking landscape and its unique security challenges. The chapter devoted to Wired Equivalency Privacy vulnerabilities discusses WEP’s capabilities, operation, and limitations, and serves to motivate later discussions of security improvements for wireless networking. Two chapters dedicated to wireless security issues give thorough overviews of current security measures’ shortcomings and the manner in which emerging networking technologies will address them. The chapter on 802.1X is especially noteworthy; it clearly explains the motivation for the standard and describes its ability to address security issues, while also comparing competing standards and the full range of security options. I particularly liked the author’s emphasis on the need for placing the wireless access point outside the firewall to maximize the installation’s security baseline. Barken also devotes a chapter to wireless networks in the home and enterprise. The book is an easy read, thanks to the clarity of the writing and the author’s evident expertise. I also appreciated the chapter summaries for their overviews of the key technical issues each chapter addressed. The hands-on projects give the reader an understanding of the security challenges posed by real-world wireless networks. The book does suffer from the lack of a glossary; each chapter contains multiple acronyms and having a ready reference to their definitions in one location would be helpful. This book would be good as a primary text for a college course in wireless networking if the instructor were willing to supplement the text with additional problems and projects. It’s an excellent supplementary text for any course in wireless networking. People wanting to come to grips with wireless networking on their own would be hard pressed to find a better introductory book. BookReviews