Wireless Fidelity Seminar Report 03
Wireless Fidelity Seminar Report 03
Wireless Fidelity Seminar Report 03
INTRODUCTION
Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity is freedom :it allows you to connect to the
internet from your couch at home, in a hotel room or a conferance room at work
without wires . Wi-Fi is a wireless technology like a cell phone. Wi-Fi enabled
computers send and receive data indoors and out; anywhere within the range of a
base station. And the best thing of all, it is fast.
However you only have true freedom to be connected any where if your
computer is configured with a Wi-Fi CERTIFIED radio (a PC card or similar
device). Wi-Fi certification means that you will be able able to connect
anywhere there are other Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products – whether you are at
home ,office , airports, coffee shops and other public areas equipped with a Wi-
Fi access availability.Wi-Fi will be a major face behind hotspots , to a much
greater extent.More than 400 airports and hotels in the US are targeted as Wi-Fi
hotspots.
The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED logo is your only assurance that the product has
met rigorous interoperability testing requirements to assure products from
different vendors will work together. The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED logo means that it
is a “safe” buy.
In IEEE's proposed standard for wireless LANs (IEEE 802.11), there are
two different ways to configure a network: ad-hoc and infrastructure. In the ad-
hoc network, computers are brought together to form a network "on the fly." As
shown in Figure 1, there is no structure to the network; there are no fixed points;
and usually every node is able to communicate with every other node. A good
example of this is the aforementioned meeting where employees bring laptop
computers together to communicate and share design or financial information.
Although it seems that order would be difficult to maintain in this type of
network, algorithms such as the spokesman election algorithm (SEA) [4] have
been designed to "elect" one machine as the base station (master) of the network
with the others being slaves. Another algorithm in ad-hoc network architectures
uses a broadcast and flooding method to all other nodes to establish who's who.
The ad-hoc network (Figure 1a) is one formed from a collection of peer
nodes all using RF links. This network has no formal structure; all nodes can
communicate with all other nodes. Several algorithms are available to prevent
this from being total chaos, however, including a spokesman election algorithm
that selects a master from the collective and makes all others slaves. Another
possibility is to use broadcast and flooding to all other nodes to establish an
addressing scheme. A good example of an ad-hoc network is one that is formed
when a group gets together at a meeting and everyone has WLAN-enabled PCs.
They can form an ad-hoc network at the meeting to share data.
802.11a
802.11b
802.11g
BASIC COMPONENTS
Stations
Wireless APs
other wireless clients through the wireless AP. Wireless APs are not
mobile and act as peripheral bridge devices that extend a wired network.
Ports
OPERATION BASICS
When a wireless adapter is turned on, it begins to scan across the wireless
frequencies for wireless APs and other wireless clients in ad hoc mode.
Assuming that the wireless client is configured to operate in infrastructure mode,
the wireless adapter chooses a wireless AP with which to connect. This selection
is made automatically by using an SSID and signal strength and frame error rate
information. Next, the wireless adapter switches to the assigned channel of the
selected wireless AP and negotiates the use of a port. This is known as
establishing an association.
If the signal strength of the wireless AP is too low, the error rate too high,
or if instructed by the operating system (in the case of Windows XP), the
wireless adapter scans for other wireless APs to determine whether a different
wireless AP can provide a stronger signal or lower error rate. If such a wireless
AP is located, the wireless adapter switches to the channel of that wireless AP
and negotiates the use of a port. This is known as reassociation.
TECHNOLOLGY
The reason for using RF is simple. It can pass through solid objects such
as office walls. However, radio waves do not go on forever in all directions
without weakening or being affected by physical barriers. The user needs to have
some understanding of their propagation characteristics, as well as the
relationship between power levels and data rates, before a wireless network can
be designed.
Geometric Spreading loss - Radio waves, like light waves, get weaker as they
expand outward away from their source. This loss grows as the square of the
distance. This means that if a device is moved twice as far away, the signal
power drops by one fourth.
Path loss - The above phenomena lead to path loss, or an unavoidable weakening
of the signal's power as it propagates outward. In an office environment, the
placement of furniture and walls, and even the movement and location of people,
will contribute to the amount of path loss.
Multipath - If a received signal is made up of radio waves from the same signal
that has dispersed and arrived from different paths, i.e. some of the original
energy was often exhibit this as ghosting. Network users may likewise
experience its digital counterpart - referred to as intersymbol interference. This
is caused when the difference in time between radio waves arriving from the
same signal, referred to as delay spread, is enough to cause symbol overlap in the
digital data. As the data transmission speed gets faster, the time between received
data bits get smaller and more susceptible to intersymbol interference, so
multipath places an upper limit on data transmission speed.
When used in wireless technologies, the ideal radio wave should have
high speed, use little energy and travel far distaces.This type of radio wave would
let us transfer information in few milliseconds, require little battery power and
send signals at whatever range we needed.
SECURITY
Before this issue is explained in detail, the reader needs to keep in mind
that Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) only attempts to provide security for the wireless
portion of a network. It is not end-to-end security, and it was never intended to
do more than prevent casual eavesdropping, which is what un-encrypted wired
Local Area Networks (LANs) provide.
The user must, however, keep in mind that wireless networks cannot
provide the same level of inherent security at the physical level that wired
networks do. Radio waves pass through walls and can be intercepted from a
distance. Even though a standard Wireless LAN (WLAN) card in a laptop may
indicate a marginal or even non-existent signal, specialized equipment may be
able to receive the signal from a much greater distance. More security is often
required, whether the network is wired or wireless.
is just the opposite. It is as strong as its strongest link. For example, end-to-end
security can be achieved by a strong mechanism in the application layer only,
even if link-layer security is broken or non-existent. However, that solution only
provides security for that particular application. The advantage to applying
security at progressively lower levels is that it becomes generally available to
more applications.
Stream ciphers are very simple and operate in theory by expanding the
shared key into an infinite pseudo-random key stream which is logically
combined (XORed) with the plaintext to produce ciphertext. Being a symmetric
cipher, the user employs the shared key at the receiving end to regenerate the
identical key stream, which is then XORed with the ciphertext to reproduce the
plaintext. In practice, of course, an infinite key stream is never produced; it is
only as long as the data stream being encrypted.
Once a key has been used to generate a key stream, the same key can
never be reused again because it will generate the same key stream. If an attacker
can obtain two different ciphertexts encrypted with the same key stream, the
encryption process can be broken and the contents of the shared key determined.
An important consequence of this is that if an encrypted transmission is
interrupted and the encryption and decryption algorithms lose synchronization,
and there is no means to resynchronize the process, then the entire message must
be resent again, but with a different key.
The problem arises when the RC4 stream cipher is being used to encrypt
data being sent over a channel, such as a wireless link, where it is highly likely
that packets will be dropped. If there is no provision for key management
(802.11 currently has none), then there is no way to create and exchange a new
key with an authenticated user so that a packet can be resent.
The designers of WEP tried to get around this by appending a unique key.
The effect is that instead of having only one 40-bit shared key available for use,
there are now 224 different 64-bit shared keys. The receiver only needs to know
the secret shared 40-bit portion which is common to all of them. The unique 24-
bit IV vector, which is transmitted unencrypted with each packet, determines
which of the keys was used to encrypt a particular packet. The key stream is
generated with this unique 64-bit "packet" key and the packet key and the key
stream change for every packet.
One of the problems with this scheme is that there are only a finite
number of IVs available for use, and there is no mechanism in place for
changing the shared key when all of the available unique IVs get used up.
Another is that the simple process of concatenating the IV onto the shared key
produces unique keys that are too similar.
It provide the most robust security solutions for corporate LANs and are
already widely used for intranets and remote access. A VPN typically utilizes a
dedicated server that provides both authentication and confidentiality. Wireless
Access Points are also beginning to include VPN technologies within their
devices, allowing simplified VPN deployment.A VPN works through the VPN
server at the company head quarters, creating an encryption scheme for data
transferred to computers outside the corporate offices.The special VPN software
on the remote computer uses the same encryption scheme, enabling the data to be
safely transferred back and forth with no chance of interception.
Unlike today’s wired network, a Wi-Fi network requires little more than
an access point(AP). Access to a Wi-Fi- network does not require an expensive
connection to each user. Wi-Fi technology is also far less expensive to deploy
than the limited wireless technologies of currently existing cellular servicing
providers.
Access to a Wi-Fi broad band can be provided both outdoors and indoors.
Whether from an outdoor café or a park bench a person can access the Internet if
they are in range of a service station. Such a Wi-Fi broadband is much power full
and can transmit data at a rate of 11Mbps which is sufficient for all types of
multimedia.
A Wi-Fi network can provide many benefits for the society. It can provide
local hospitals.
Though the radio waves are of relatively high frequency, they are not
powerful enough to pass through multiple layers of building materials.
Specifically radio waves are completely blocked by steel. For this reasons the
factors deciding performance are proximity to access point and the degree to
which the signal is blocked by the surroundings.
which it is physically linked. As a result, all computers that are associated with a
specific access point must share the same bandwidth. More computers means the
possibility for a slower network connection.
CONCLUSION
Wi-Fi use is growing fast in homes, public access areas and business –
both large and small. The Wi-Fi alliance is active with many industry
organisations and is working closely with manufacturers to make sure that
existing Wi-Fi gear is compatable with wireless technologies developed in the
future .
REFERENCES
ABSTRACT
The technologies used in this field are one of the best in the wireless
space. When compared with other fast improving technologies like Bluetooth and
3G, Wi-Fi is seen to have many advantages. We can setup networks at home and
office using Wi-Fi . It is fairly easy to setup a Wi-Fi enabled network at home or
a small office. Wi- Fi is several times faster than Bluetooth and operates like a
high speed modem.
There are many security issues that come under Wi-Fi . The main problem
that it has till now is that it is easy for hackers to attack the network. The security
method that is used now is the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy).The new VPN
(Virtual Private Network) method seems to correct everything that is wrong with
WEP.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ARIFA HAMEED
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION 01
3. BASIC COMPONENTS 06
4. OPERATION BASICS 08
5. TECHNOLOLGY 09
6. SECURITY 13
8. CONCLUSION 20
9. REFERENCES 21