Wireless Lan Security Authentication Technology Research

As the development of the WLAN and the increasing WLAN's users, the 21^st statistic report of Internet developing status of China from the CNNIC shows, the Chinese WLAN narrow band users are reach to 61.9 millions till Dec of year 2007, it's the 29.5 percent of the overall users. The most obvious strongpoint of WLAN is the feature of mobility, So long as the users do not go out the coverage area of the base station, they can use the network resource. Furthermore WLAN provides the convenience for the adding users, but the challenges on the security come along. Traditional network security is focus on the entity security of network devices, data streams are in the physical wire media. The wireless media of the WLAN means if we haven't any encryption protection on the transmit link, anyone can peer the data with some proper devices. So encryption technology becomes an effective method for the security of the WLAN.This paper describes common security authentication technology of the WLAN, and analysis the principals and existence problems of them. The paper also provides the enhancement solution of traditional 802. 1x, and the plan of wireless switch central control in the enterprise WLAN. For security, flexibility and cost etc. consideration, this paper also discuss 802.1x+WPA2 Authentication solution, Multi-SSID, Wireless Switch+FIT AP and traditional AP combined plan for the medium enterprise WLAN. The plan ensures the different user security levels, which protect user's investment greatly, and the combined solutions are applied in the campus WLAN of Guizhou Normal University successfully. It's will be a good reference mode for other campus WLAN, the research has the very good practical significance.