From the course: CompTIA A+ (220-901) Cert Prep: 5 Networking
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Wireless encryption
From the course: CompTIA A+ (220-901) Cert Prep: 5 Networking
Wireless encryption
- The one downside to a wireless network is that unless you do something, everything that you're sending back and forth is being broadcast over, well, radio waves. And a bad guy can be intercepting these radio waves, sitting in a parked car, with his own system, and if he knows how to do it, he could literally capture your conversations and see everything you're doing. So that's a bad thing. Now the people who originally invented 802.11 knew this, and they came up with an authentication method which allowed you to actually talk to the wireless access point, and an encryption method, which would then encrypt your data. This standard had all kinds of problems. First of all, the authentication was very, very poor. It literally would transmit passwords in the clear, as part of the authentication process. So on today's wireless access points, we pretty much ignore authentication, which means anybody can talk to a wireless access point. Now, the trick is, is that now you have to have an…