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Wireless LAN security continues to be a major thorn in the side of everyone who promotes, sells or installs WLANs. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is easily compromised with relatively simple tools, forcing vendors and IT managers to look elsewhere for encryption solutions. Likewise, there's no real standard for authentication. Yes, 802.1x may work eventually, but today it almost always requires the implementation of a proprietary authentication framework. And authorization, including the ability to assign granular levels of access rights once users attach to the network, is an afterthought (see our June 10 evaluation of WLAN security overlay products.)

Even if vendors address privacy, authentication and authorization services, your security headaches won't end. Other problems are looming, the most pernicious of which are DoS (denial of service) attacks. While DoS is a fact of life on all networks, it's worse on wireless networks because not only do you need to guard against attacks at Layer 2 and above, you're also extremely vulnerable to physical-layer attacks to the medium.