Alan Holt
Chi-Yu Huang
802.11 Wireless
Networks
Security and Analysis
Dr. Alan Holt
IP Performance
1-3 Merietts Court
Long Ashton Business Park
Long Ashton
Bristol BS41 9LW
UK
Dr. Chi-Yu Huang
Tata Technologies Ltd
6 Monarch Court
Emerald Park
Emersons Green
Bristol BS16 7FH
UK
Series Editor
Professor A.J. Sammes, BSc, MPhil, PhD, FBCS, CEng
Centre for Forensic Computing
Cranfield University
DCMT, Shrivenham
Swindon SN6 8LA
UK
ISSN 1617-7975
ISBN 978-1-84996-274-2
e-ISBN 978-1-84996-275-9
DOI 10.1007/978-1-84996-275-9
Springer London Dordrecht Heidelberg New York
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010930228
© Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010
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Preface
This book is about wireless local area networks (WLANs) based upon the IEEE
802.11 standards. It has three primary objectives:
• To introduce the principles of 802.11 wireless networks and show how to config-
ure equipment in order to implement various network solutions.
• To provide an understanding of the security implications of wireless networks and
demonstrate how vulnerabilities can be mitigated.
• To introduce the underlying 802.11 protocols and build mathematical models in
order to analyse performance in a WLAN environment.
The book is aimed at industry professionals as well as undergraduate and gradu-
ate level students. It is intended as a companion for a university course on wireless
networking.
A practical approach is adopted in this book; examples are provided throughout,
supported by detailed instructions. We cover a number of wireless vendors; namely,
Cisco’s Aironet, Alactel-Lucent’s Omniaccess and Meru Networks. While separate
vendors, all three systems have a Cisco IOS-like command-line interface.
The GNU/Linux operating system is used extensively throughout this book.
GNU/Linux systems have gained considerable popularity in the server and em-
bedded system market (indeed, both Alcatel-Lucent and Meru Network’s wireless
equipment are based upon GNU/Linux). As well as the core GNU/Linux software
we also use a number of open source applications. Wireless equipment does not op-
erate in isolation. There are times when other network services are required, such as
RADIUS. FreeRADIUS, in conjunction with a MySQL database server, is used to
demonstrate an enterprise secutity WLAN. For convenience, the Xen virtualisation
application is employed to emulate a multi-server environment. We show how to
build and configure these systems.
There are many GNU/Linux distributions available. In this book, we use Debian
and its derivative, Ubuntu. Debian and Debian like distributions have APT, a power-
ful package management application that greatly simplifies software installation and
maintenance. Other distributions will have their advocates and supporters and if you
wish to replicate the examples in this book we suggest you use the distribution with
vii
viii
Preface
which you are most familiar. However, you will have to translate the instructions to
suit your distribution where they differ from Ubuntu/Debian.
We present a number of mathematical models in this book for analysing the per-
formance of 802.11. We show how to build these models using the commercial
application computer algebra, Maple. The examples presented in this book were
developed on Maple version 11, but all the examples should work on older versions.
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