Appendix D Wireless LANs
AMG1202-T10A User’s Guide
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The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security methods available on 
your ZyXEL Device.
Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the ZyXEL Device 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:
• Authentication 
Determines the identity of the users.
•Authorization
Determines the network services available to authenticated users once they are connected to the 
network.
• Accounting
Keeps track of the client’s network activity. 
Table 110   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