From the course: CISSP Cert Prep (2021): 4 Communication and Network Security

Understanding wireless networking

From the course: CISSP Cert Prep (2021): 4 Communication and Network Security

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Understanding wireless networking

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- [Narrator] Wireless networking is everywhere. We use wireless networks to provide network access to our smartphones, tablets and laptop computers and to a wide variety of other devices, including televisions, thermostats and even home automation systems. As the use of wireless networks continues to increase the security of those networks becomes of critical importance. The most common wireless standard in use today is wifi. Wifi is actually a set of standards governed by the Institute of electrical and electronics engineers and it describes the technical details of how wireless devices may communicate with each other and with wireless access points and the use of a standard is absolutely essential because without a standard wireless devices wouldn't speak the same language. Standardization is what allows any wifi device to work with any wifi network around the world. Wifi works by replacing the wires and cables of wired networks with radio transmitters and receivers. Every device that supports wifi contains a radio transceiver that is capable of communicating on one or more standard wifi bands. From smartphones to laptops and video game consoles to internet connected smoke detectors each device contains a small chip similar to the one shown here and an antenna used to transmit and receive wifi signals. Most wifi networks are also connected to local networks that are in turn connected to the internet. This allows wireless devices to not only communicate with each other, but also to communicate with wired devices and systems located anywhere on the internet. This type of communication requires a connection between wireless networks and a wired network. Home and business networks use wireless access points such as the one shown here to perform that connection. These access points contain powerful antennas, transmitters and receivers that allow them to broadcast wifi signals over large areas. They're also connected with a cable to a traditional wired network. Wireless devices in the area can then communicate with the access point to connect to other networks. There are many different versions of the 802.11 standard for wifi that use increasingly sophisticated wireless technology to provide higher bandwidth and longer range coverage. Earliest version of wifi, the 802.11 standard was released in 1997 and it allowed communications only up to two megabits per second. Two years later, the 802.11b standard more than quintupled that speed to allow communication at 11 megabits per second. 802.11g released in 2003 bumped up the maximum bandwidth to an average throughput of 22 megabits per second. Well 802.11n brought a tremendous boost in bandwidth to 600 megabits per second, in 2009 by using special antennas known as multiple input, multiple output, or my Mo antennas. The 802.11ac standard now allows communication over wifi networks at speeds over one gigabit per second. Now, one of the important things to remember about wifi signals is that they are radio transmissions and as such, they can be picked up by anyone with a suitable antenna and receiver. Unlike wired networks, wireless signals travel out in many different directions. This introduces new security concerns as network administrators must carefully protect against eavesdropping attacks. We'll take a look at ways to secure wireless networks in the next few videos.

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