Establishing a wireless network is just a part of the task as it also should be secured so that your activity and data are protected. This article will introduce you into the topic of network security.
Maximizing your security
To increase the security even to the maximum, activate and use MAC filtering. MAC filtering is associated with its own device address, which is bunch of special digits to identify those devices. With MAC filtering you are able to allow which devices should be connected to your WAP and deny others. You should find the MAC filtering option somewhere in your WAP’s web based utility. Exactly where is this option depends and vary from vendor to vendor. In case if you do no know where this option is, simply lookup online with your router’s model.
Setting up encryption
Next thing you want to make sure is that your encryption is setup by setting the security mode on the WAP and then generating a unique password or security key. Next, you want to configure all the connected wireless nodes on the network with the same credentials. For setting up the security protocol or mode, WEP protocol provides some security but not enough to keep the bad guys away and typically easily cracked. Always use WPA3 or WPA2. In case, if you have an older equipment, set it up for WPA for the time being and try to upgrade it asap. Upgrading to latter ones is even crucial if you are transferring sensitive data over network.
WEP support
If you are dealing with an older equipment which supports only WEP, they come in with an option to automatically generate a set of encryption keys or do it manually. Generally you wanna save your time and headache with automatically generated method. Then select an encryption level. The usual choices are either 64 bit or 128 bit and then enter an unique passphrase and click the generate button or whichever equivalent option you get on your WAP. Then go ahead and select the default key and save the settings.
The kind of encryption level, key and passphrase you get, must match on each of the wireless client nodes in order to successfully establishing the connection. Many of the WAPs come in with the capability of exporting WEP encryption key data onto a media storage device so that you can easily import it on any client workstation. You can also otherwise, manually configure the encryption by using the windows wireless configuration utility.