User's Manual

locations.
● Security: The 802.11 wireless networks use encryption to help protect your data.
Wired equivalent privacy (WEP) uses a 64-bit or 128-bit shared encryption key to
scramble data. Before a computer transmits data, it scrambles the data using the
secret encryption key. The receiving computer uses this same key to unscramble
the data. If you are connecting to an existing network, use the encryption key
provided by the administrator of the wireless network. If you are setting up your
own network you can make up your own key and use it on each computer.
❍ Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a security enhancement that strongly
increases the level of data protection and access control to a WLAN. WPA
mode enforces 802.1x authentication and key-exchange to strengthen data
encryption. WPA utilizes its Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP
provides important data encryption enhancements that include a per-packet
key mixing function, a message integrity check (MIC) named "Michael", an
extended initialization vector (IV) with sequencing rules, and a also re-keying
mechanism. Using these improvement enhancements, TKIP protects against
WEP's known weaknesses.
❍ Cisco Client Extention (CCX) is a server and client 802.1x authentication
via a user-supplied logon password. When a wireless access point
communicates with a Cisco LEAP-enabled RADIUS (Cisco Secure Access
Control Server (ACS) server), Cisco LEAP provides access control through
mutual authentication between client wireless adapters and the wireless
network and provides dynamic, individual user encryption keys to help
protect the privacy of transmitted data.
Identifying a Wireless Network
Depending on the size and components of a wireless LAN, there are many ways to
identify a wireless LAN:
● The Network Name or Service Set Identifier (SSID): Identifies a wireless
network. All wireless devices on the network must use the same SSID.
● Extended Service Set Identifier (ESSID): A special case of SSID used to identify
a wireless network that includes access points.
● Independent Basic Service Set Identifier (IBSSID): A special case of SSID used
to identify a network of wireless computers configured to communicate directly with
one another without using an access point.
● Basic Service Set Identifier (BSSID): A unique identifier for each wireless device.
The BSSID is the Ethernet MAC address of the device.
● Broadcast SSID: An access point can respond to computers sending probe