ZyXEL Communications P-334U - Manual (Page 284)

P-334U/P-335U User’s Guide
284 Appendix E Wireless LANs
Wireless Security Overview
Wireless security is vital to your network to protect wireless communication between wireless
clients, access points and the wired network.
Wireless security methods available on the Prestige are data encryption, wireless client
authentication, restricting access by device MAC address and hiding the Prestige identity.
The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security methods
available on your Prestige.
Table 111 Wireless Security Levels
Security Level Security Type
Least Secure
Most Secure
Unique SSID (Default)
Unique SSID with Hide SSID Enabled
MAC Address Filtering
WEP Encryption
IEEE802.1x EAP with RADIUS Server Authentication
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
WPA2
Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the Prestige and on all
wireless clients that you want to associate with it.
IEEE 802.1x
In June 2001, the IEEE 802.1x standard was designed to extend the features of IEEE 802.11 to
support extended authentication as well as providing additional accounting and control
features. It is supported by Windows XP and a number of network devices. Some advantages
of IEEE 802.1x are:
• User based identification that allows for roaming.
• Support for RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service, RFC 2138, 2139) for
centralized user profile and accounting management on a network RADIUS server.
• Support for EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol, RFC 2486) that allows additional
authentication methods to be deployed with no changes to the access point or the wireless
clients.
RADIUS
RADIUS is based on a client-server model that supports authentication, authorization and
accounting. The access point is the client and the server is the RADIUS server. The RADIUS
server handles the following tasks: