Mobile working Toolkit

Story: Future of wireless broadband is in the air

Posted by: Robert Syputa (Friday 30 January 2004, 4:51 PM)

What Neanderthal thinking!

Get your head out of the cave of paranoia and venture out into the free world. . .
Wireless BB WiMAX is very secure. WiFi, 802.11, was originally intended to be used as a WLAN - a local area network with limited range. Certainly the security issues were given a lower priority in the design of 802.11b/.11a. 802.16 starts out with a WBA/WMAN pedigree. many of the companies involved with it's development have experience with proprietary WBB systems sold to government, corporations and telcos where high levels of security is a primary requirement. Although high level security was planned for in 802.16 by the time WiFi's mistakes erupted full scale, that and the evolution of on -chip encryption, processors and memory in WBB SOICs probably helped to assure security got adequate attention.

WiFi's 802.11i version dictates a higher level of security and pretty well concludes that a hardware based 'encryption engine' is placed directly on the one or two ICs. The latest, 802.11i enabled 802.11g/a/b chips have this on-chip encryption or are expected to be closely coupled with off chip components. This allows the compute intensive high level encryption algorithms to be executed at full processor speeds and data bandwidths. In many respects, this is MORE SECURE against intrusion than most wired designs. With the typical unsupervised wire link (or fiber optic for that matter) all it takes is connecting or otherwise taping into the line to retrieve unencrypted data. Most encryption that occurs over common Ethernet links is open for anyone with access to the premisses.

The assumption that communications open to the airwaves is necessarily insecure is erroneous.