NetComms > Wireless > Overview of Wireless Technologies

Wireless Technologies

Definitions

• 802.11
• 802.1X
• EAP
• WEP
• WPA
• Supplicant

802.11

802.11 is a family of standards for wireless networking defined by the IEEE.

Your wireless hardware supports one more of the standards that make up 802.11. The following table may be helpful in understanding the standards relevant to ANU's wireless service:

Standard	Release Date	Frequency Band	Max Throughput	ANU-Access	ANU-Secure	Eduroam	ResNet
802.11a	Oct 1999	5 GHz	54 Mbps	no	yes	yes	no
802.11b	Oct 1999	2.4 GHz	11 Mbps	yes	yes	yes	yes
802.11g	June 2003	2.4 GHz	54 Mbps	yes	yes	yes	yes
802.11n	draft 2008	2.4 & 5 GHz	300-600 Mbps	no	yes	yes	no

ANU-Access requires an 802.11b or 802.11g wireless adapter.

Typically an adapter made after June 2003 will support both (802.11b/g), whereas adapters made between 2000 and 2003 will only support 802.11b. Either is supported on ANU-Access however 802.11g-compatible adapters are preferred as the precense of 802.11b clients lowers the performance for 802.11g clients.

ANU-Access does not support 802.11a adapters - these operate in the 5GHz frequency band that requires different hardware.

802.1X

802.1X is an IEEE authentication framework use on both wired and wireless networks to provide authentication at the data-link layer. This is one level below the IP layer, so happens 'earlier' in the user's connection process and is capable of providing more security than traditional methods such as web proxies or captive portal authentication.

802.1X leverages EAP (Extensible Authentication Framework), an IETF standard.

EAP

EAP is a suite of authentication protocols and methods defined under a common framework. It's purpose is to simplify the implementation of complex authentication technologies, and to simply their enhancement as new technology becomes available.

ANU wireless services use a sub-type of EAP, called PEAP (Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol). PEAP in turn can use several 'inner' methods. The inner method in use at ANU is EAP-GTC. PEAP(EAP-GTC) provides an excellent level of security on wireless networks. You do not need to know what these are or how they work, but your operating system may require you to know the names of the methods used when configuring a new connection.

WEP

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a basic encryption scheme for 802.11 using a pre-shared key (password). ANU-Access does not support WEP, therefore traffic on ANU-Access is unencrypted by default. This means basic web browsing is in the clear, and could be intercepted and read by other wireless clients in the area. Applications that encrypt traffic themselves, such as https websites, are still encrypted on ANU-Access - only applications that do not natively use encryption are vulnerable. WEP by contrast encrypts all traffic between your machine and the wireless network.

WPA

WiFi Protected Access (WPA) is essentially a more secure packaging of WEP technology. It is always preferred to use WEP instead of WPA, however WEP is more widely supported, especially by older wireless adapters.

When configuring a new connection, you may need to know the following informaiton:

• WPA version 1 (WPA) uses TKIP
• WPA version 2 (WPA2) uses AES

Supplicant

From Wikipedia:

'A Wireless Supplicant is a program that runs on a computer and is responsible for making login requests to a wireless network. It handles passing the login and encryption credentials to the authentication server. It also handles roaming from one wireless access point to another, in order to maintain connectivity.'