English 421: Technical Writing

http://www.networkworld.com/whitepapers/ciscolan/

Well I chose this article because I think it's a good representation of a white paper from Cisco, and because I just had to read this white paper for a class on Wireless Networking.  This article is relatively old but regardless I believe it still does an excellent job adddressing 802.11 wireless security and identifying the weaknesses in the current security options.  This article begins by stating what WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is and how it addresses the security problems inherent in broadcasting your network through radio frequency. It also identifies the weaknesses in WEP, I'm not sure if it was as easily crackable when this article was written as it is now but there were always security shortcoming, it also addresses the benefit of using a centralized authentication server running radius or any other authenticating protocol. It begins talking about EAP which is a very good idea for anyone that is just running WEP encryption on their wireless network.  This article also addresses the vulnerabilities of the client that is connection to the network, most of the time the client is blissfully unaware to which exact internal access point that they are connecting to, and their machine, unfortunately, is just as unaware as them... this can be a problem when someone places a rogue access point inside the network using the same SSID as the "good" access points, this can prove to be a HUGE security flaw, as anyone with any knowledge of networking can throw an access point into a network and just steal the traffic coming into it (credit card information, passwords, etc. etc). This article, I believe, does a great job addressing these concerns and identifying possible solutions to them.