Basic Security in Wireless Networks

Enabling Encryption

Now you need to enable WPA-2 encryption. As we explained, routers come with no encryption at all, meaning that anyone can have access to your network! As usual, the exact location where this configuration is done will depend on your router brand and model. In our router this configuration was available under “Wireless,” “Wireless Security.” Several encryption options are available, as you can see in Figure 4. Choose WPA-2 or “WPA2 Personal” (the “WPA2 Enterprise” option allows the use of a RADIUS authentication server for users to login to the network; this feature is normally only used on large corporate networks). If your router doesn’t list WPA2 as an option, this means your router doesn’t support WPA2 (probably because it is an older model). We’d suggest you to upgrade its firmware, but this should be already done by now. In this case we strongly suggest you to replace your router, as your network won’t be secure with it.

Figure 4: Encryption options. Choose “WPA2-Personal.”

After choosing WPA-2 as the encryption mechanism to be used, you will need to create a security key (think of it as a password to access your wireless network). Users willing to connect to your network wirelessly will need to configure this key on their computers. You need to create a random key containing 63 alphanumeric characters. It can be shorter, but we don’t recommend. Just go crazy pressing random characters on your keyboard, don’t feel tempted in actually typing something that make sense (see example in Figure 5; obviously don’t use the example we are giving). After typing this random 63-character word, select it, copy it to Notepad and then print it. Don’t forget to save it by clicking on “Save Settings.”

Figure 5: Configuring the encryption key.

The next step is to configure the computers that can access your network to use the random key you have just created.