Other Wireless Standards in Development

There are other wireless standards under development as follows:

WiMAX

WiMAX is a world wide interoperability for microwave access by the WiMAX form that was created in April 2001. The main purpose of WiMAX is to promote conformance and interoperability of the IEEE 802.16 standard (Wireless Man). The WiMAX Forum is the only organization its kind dedicated towards certifying the interoperability of BW products. This forum is also responsible to ensure that different vendor systems work together impeccably. Those systems which pass test achieve a WiMAX Forum certificate.

Security issues regarding 802.11

Even being the best wireless LAN network yet there are some security issues with it. An account of the problems faced with 802.11 is given below:

• Easy to explore

  Wireless LANs are very easy to detect. This can cause your network to be easily explored. Therefore, generally network providers advertise their existence so that their clients gel up and use the services provided by the network. It is essential that network providers advertise their existence from time to time with special frames known as beacons. Until and unless a wireless network is not placed under a heavily secured office that does not allow RF signals to escape, you cannot keep your wireless network secured from being detected.

• Unencrypted traffic and network

  Wireless networks do not use any sort of encryption method. Due to this the traffic is left completely open. Abuse of network, sniffing and malicious attacks are very common in such situation.
• Unauthorized use of service
As mentioned earlier, wireless networks are easy to detect. Therefore any one can use your network services without authorization. The biggest threat is that anyone can anytime explore your network, reconfigure your access point and can lock it with their own password.

Wireless networks and firewalls

A wireless network is a distrusted and an unreliable network. Therefore, even firewalls in such situation cannot help you. There are certain cases where people have installed firewalls yet their network is open to the whole community of that network.