English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

In this last blog, I wanted to cover security protocols and also get some general statistic information about wireless users for our introduction. I thought this information might be helpful to establish why a salesperson might want to know about these different routers.

I found a few studies about internet usage and broadband/wireless usage on this website. The 2008 study found that 55% of American adults had broadband internet connections at home, which means 55% would be eligible to buy or use the routers we're comparing. In addition, the report found that 34% of all internet uses have used WiFi at some place other than home or work, but 95% of these users (so, roughly 32% overall) have broadband at home. This makes 32% a perfect section of the population to target for home usage of wireless internet. This site puts the information into a chart that we could use in our report.

As for security issues, I read three sites about WEP, WPA, WPA2 and MAC Address Filtering. From what I read, it appears that WPA2 is the most secure encryption option, and MAC Address Filtering can be used on top of that, if supported by the router. . We could incorporate that more important information into the text of our document, and then use a table or chart to document the three types of encryption (see below).

Here is the information I found on encryption:
http://www.ezlan.net/wpa_wep.html
WEP
- 40bits (encryption) (key) + 24bits (initialization vector) = 64bits encryption
- 104bits (encryption) + 24 bits (initialization vector)= 128bits encryption
- uses RC4 stream encryption, “one of the major culprits in the security issues”
- the initialization vector repeats, which makes it easy to guess, and it’s in plaintext
WPA
- an interim solution to WEP
- still uses RC4, but changes the key to TKIP
- TKIP generates a sequence of WEP keys based on a master key, and periodically re-keys
- Also checks transmissions and re-keys when it detects security risks

WPA2
- changes RC4 use to AES (Advance Encryption Standard)
- instead of TKIP/MIC, it uses AES-CCMP encryption, which has its own mechanism for dynamic key generation and is resistant to statistical analysis of the cipher text.

Wireless MAC address filtering
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/networkprotocolsip/l/aa062202a.htm

MAC addresses are 12-digit hexadecimal numbers (48 bits in length). By convention, MAC addresses are usually written in one of the following two formats:

MM:MM:MM:SS:SS:SS
MM-MM-MM-SS-SS-SS

The first half of a MAC address contains the ID number of the adapter manufacturer. These IDs are regulated by an Internet standards body (see sidebar). The second half of a MAC address represents the serial number assigned to the adapter by the manufacturer

http://netsecurity.about.com/od/quicktip1/qt/qtwifimacfilter.htm
If you enable MAC address filtering, only the devices with MAC addresses configured in the wireless router or access point will be allowed to connect.