Appendix D Wireless LANs
NXC Series User’s Guide
495
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 NXC are data encryption, wireless client authentication,
restricting access by device MAC address and hiding the NXC identity.
The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security methods available on your
NXC.
Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the NXC 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.
Table 235 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
WiFi Protected Access (WPA)
WPA2
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