Executive Summary

With increasing investment in mobile working, public sector users tell GTN that they would love to make greater use of public Wi-Fi networks to increase the effectiveness of mobile working.
Even internally within the corporate office, users often tell GTN that moving from the wired LAN to various Wi-Fi access points across the organisation is clumsy, with applications needing to be restarted as one moves from one network type to the other, and needing to log in again. The ideal would be for applications to survive, with no additional user logon, as one moves around.

Significant productivity gains can be enjoyed from Wi-Fi internally if applications could persist across network changes. This paper describes not only how employing an appropriate mobile working infrastructure can achieve that, it can also address the valid concern from IT Security professionals, that Wi-Fi hot-spots across the country are not secure; they are vulnerable to attack. Being able to unlock the use of public Wi-Fi hotspots offers a massive boost in connectivity for many.

The typical defence from IT to counter the vulnerability posed by public Wi-Fi is to block people from using public hot-spots. This is often the only ready defence mechanism they have to this exposure to security breaches. In so doing IT constrains users and thwarts an opportunity for productivity and improved services.

The paper below details how employing the appropriate mobile security infrastructure could unleash significant productivity benefits and savings. The paper also highlights how the proposed approach increases security and productivity for users of internal access points.

Tiered Wireless Security

This paper will look at both enhancing security of internal Wi-Fi Access Points (owned and controlled by your organisation) and separately look at public Wi-Fi access points
Partial Security - Securing Your internal Access Points

Today's wireless networks allow businesses to make their users more efficient and mobile. These same wireless networks also need to be as secure as internal, wired networks. The success of standards within the WLAN industry has resulted in a high WLAN adoption rate in the corporate environment, both inside and outside the trusted network. With this success has come an increased risk to corporate security.

Access Point (AP) security is often not as complete as it could be for full protection: security options included with wireless access points have been repeatedly shown to be insufficient when they are the only security component considered in an implementation.

Clearly the use of the IEEE 802.1X standard offers an effective framework for authenticating and controlling user traffic to a protected network, as well as dynamically varying encryption keys. 802.1X ties a protocol called EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) to both the wired and wireless LAN media and supports multiple authentication methods, such as token cards, Kerberos, one-time passwords, certificates, and public key authentication.

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