Securing Your Home Wireless Connection
By Suraj Tiwari,CISM
Summary
There is lot of noise these days about securing wireless connections which are setup for individual use at their respective homes or in offices. It is very important to secure your wireless connections to avoid misuse. You never know you may be caught on the wrong side of the law without actually breaking it!!
Below are tips to secure your WiFi connectivity whether it is at home or at office.
Change your WiFi Routers default Administrative Password:
Most routers contain a default user ID and password. Because this password is well known and easy to guess, you must change the default password. You can easily make this change by running the router’s installation and setup wizard or through the routers GUI which normally uses the browser like internet explorer etc.
Change Default SSID:
WiFi routers have a Service Set Identifier (SSID) that’s set by the manufacturer. An SSID is a sequence of as many as 32 letters or numbers that comprise a wireless LAN’s (WLAN’s) ID or name. Default SSIDs are well known and published. Therefore, it is very important that default SSID is changed and made unique. It is advisable to change SSID at regular intervals, maybe once in 45 days.
Disable SSID Broadcast:
By default, a WiFi router broadcasts the router's SSID. This broadcast should be disabled. Disabling the SSID broadcast adds one more layer of security against casual eavesdroppers.
Use Encryption:
Encryption provides security to your wireless communication, you must enable it. However, before setting up encryption, you must understand a few facts about wireless encryption and the security that different types of encryption standards provide, specifically, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and WiFi Protected Access (WPA).
WEP
WEP is the 802.11 standard’s optional encryption method. It's supported by most wireless NIC and is the most common method for securing home wireless networks. However, WEP has two limitations. First, it has a long key that's difficult to remember for a common user. Setting up the network for such a user can therefore be challenging. Second, the WEP encrypted data can be decrypted by using some of the available hacking tools. If you are using WEP, make sure you are aware about the latest WEP vulnerabilities and are patched against them.
WPA
WPA was created as an improvement over WEP security. One big WPA improvement over WEP is the addition of the Temporal Key Integrity (TKIP). security protocol that dynamically changes the keys used to encrypt the data. This change alone makes WPA more secure than WEP. Another advantage of using WPA is that it takes a pass phrase as a key, which is easier to remember and set up than the long and complicated WEP key.
Enable MAC Address Filter:
Every NIC has a unique MAC address or physical address. You can configure most wireless routers to filter based on these addresses.
Typing C:\>ipconfig /all
at a command prompt will let you know the MAC address of the device. After you know the MAC address, you can log on to the router and add the MAC address to the filter. You will have to add and save the MAC address to your router only once and subsequent visits will be seamless.
Before adding the MAC address, you must enable the MAC filter. Most routers let you either allow only specific PCs to access the network or deny specific PCs access to the network.
Filtering MAC addresses isn’t foolproof: An intruder can change a device’s MAC address to circumvent MAC address filtering. However, a hacker would need to know the MAC address of a device on your network before doing so.
Feedback
Was it worth investing your time in reading this article? Please let me know.
Suraj Tiwari– email: suraj3tiwari@hotmail.com or blog me at ugaininfo.blogspot.com