Detailing the need, and the generations of encryption that have been applied to wireless networking.
Wireless networking has become ubiquitous in our society, used in both homes and businesses alike to connect a wide variety of computing products. Wi-Fi at most homes requires a password (opens in new tab), if for no other reason that this gets enabled by default at the factory. However, many businesses, airports, schools, libraries and municipalities have open Wi-Fi, free for the taking to make it simple for anyone to log on to their network with a device.
While open Wi-Fi is quite convenient, it also represents a security risk, as then anyone can eavesdrop on the conversation of the wireless traffic as it goes between the client and the router. In fact, this is common enough that it has a specific name, known as a man-in-the-middle attack (MitM).
To avoid such an attack, security is needed to encode this wireless traffic, making it much more difficult for anyone to grab this data wirelessly, and then participate in your private conversation. This type of wireless security is known as wireless encryption, it is designed to protect a WLAN, so let’s take a look at this technology.
If you think back to the last spy show you watched, chances are there was some message sent between the spies to communicate the info. The message gets sent with a code applied, so that if it gets intercepted, the message comes out scrambled, and won’t be able to be read. Unless you have the key, and can put it through the correct decryption software, it is completely useless.
Just like in that spy show, wireless encryption does the same thing. A protocol for encryption (opens in new tab) gets applied- there are multiple generations available — and the scrambled data at the other end needs to be decrypted prior to the message being read. In the case of Wi-Fi data, the message is the data that the router is sending back and forth to the client that is consuming the data.
