Your 802.11 wireless network has no clothes

The explosive growth in wireless networks over the last few years resembles the rapid growth of the Internet within the last decade. To protect internal resources, organizations usually purchased and installed an Internet firewall. We believe that the currently deployed wireless access points present a larger security problem than the early Internet connections. A large number of organizations, based on vendor literature, believe that the security provided by their deployed wireless access points is sufficient to prevent unauthorized access and use. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. While the current access points provide several security mechanisms, our work combined with the work of others show that all of these mechanisms are completely ineffective. As a result, organizations with deployed wireless networks are vulnerable to unauthorized use of, and access to, their internal infrastructure. In this article we present a novel solution that requires no changes or additions to any deployed wireless equipment, and is easily deployed and transparent to end users.