Designing a Secure Wireless LAN with the HP-UX AAA RADIUS Server

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Chapter 1 Introduction
The rapid proliferation of WLANs will ultimately change how employees and organizations
accomplish their work. WLANs provide tangible IT benefits by:
• reducing costs for cabling and other IT resources
• providing employee efficiency through mobility and versatility
• projecting a cutting-edge business image
However, unplanned or unmanaged WLANs also contain associated security risks, including the
following:
• network eavesdropping
• employee identity theft
• rogue deployments
• distributed, inefficient, insecure administration
Deploying an unsecured Wireless LAN is essentially the same as placing a wired LAN connector
on the street in front of your office – anyone can connect to your LAN. Configuring default
security features on WLAN devices provides rudimentary
network-based security, which is
effective for protecting against casual eavesdropping in low-risk deployments. Enterprise-level
user-based authentication is the appropriate WLAN security design for higher-risk company
networks.
The HP-UX AAA RADIUS Server is a vital component for mitigating WLAN security risks and
integrating into an existing or new
user-based authentication mechanism. The roles that the
HP-UX AAA RADIUS Server assumes are represented in the AAA name itself:
1. Authentication: ensuring that the users are who they say they are
2. Authorization: ensuring that users have appropriate access to resources
3. Accounting: recording user access
The HP-UX AAA RADIUS Server is a standards-based solution for securing Wireless client access
to an enterprise corporate LAN. It is a component of the wireless LAN design, which is a new
technology that can be deployed independently, or can be integrated into the overall end-to-end
enterprise security model. This paper will help the System Integrator, Administrator, or IT
Professional effectively integrate WLAN by addressing the critical issues of the technology, such
as:
• The Basics of the Secure WLAN infrastructure (Chapter 2)
• Current and Evolving WLAN Standards (Chapter 3)
• How to integrate a secure AAA RADIUS WLAN into an existing IT infrastructure
(Chapter 4)
These topics illustrate the conceptual secure wireless LAN design factors, which are illustrated in
the deployment examples in Chapter 5, and a case study in Appendix B, that details the effort
and methods utilized to accomplish the ultimate objective: realizing the benefits of Wireless LAN
access without incurring the associated risks.