I have been doing a little research on the subject of WPA
wireless protection. A good description
of WPA along with its relative Pros and Cons can be found here, courtesy of Netgear.
As confirmed in this article on Wi-Fi Net News,
WPA has been broken. This refers to the preshared-key
implementation of WPA (WPA-PSK), however it doesnt seem that certificate based
WPA (802.1x RADIUS authentication) is vulnerable to this attack. Having not used RADIUS authentication
previously, I was interested to see how much work would be required to get this
up and running. I stumbled upon a great
three part article from Linux Journal. The link provided is for the third instalment,
I would suggest reading this part first, just to get an idea of what is
involved and how it all works.
RADIUS authentication is an interesting prospect, with the
possibility of using it for other purposes such as PPTP (VPN) connection auth
and Windows login. The
server can be set
up so that it logs to an SQL database, making reporting quite
simple. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has this
type of system in place.