Security is one of the most important issues when talking about wireless networks. Since the birth of these, has tried to have protocols to ensure communications, but have suffered little success. For this reason, it is convenient to carefully follow a series of steps that allow us to have the maximum degree of security that we are capable of ensuring.
There are many techniques to protect a wireless network being the first of them to provide a method of authentication to the network.
Authentication and encryption
WEP only provides a weak form of authentication and does not encrypt traffic on the wireless network. Then there are other stronger methods of authentication and, in addition, provide encryption for the exchanged packets. We can mention in this section two technologies: WPA and WPA2.
Another one is to use a VPN:
VPN is an acronym for Virtual Private Network. The purpose of a VPN is to provide you with security and privacy as you communicate over the internet.
Here’s the problem with the internet: It’s inherently insecure. When the internet was first designed, the priority was to be able to send packets (chunks of data) as reliably as possible. Networking across the country and the world was relatively new, and nodes often went down. Most of the internet’s core protocols (methods of communicating) were designed to route around failure, rather than secure data.
In fact, the applications you’re accustomed to using, whether email, web, messaging, Facebook, etc., are all built on top of that Internet Protocol (IP) core. While some standards have developed, not all internet apps are secure. Many still send their information without any security or privacy protection whatsoever.
This leaves any internet user vulnerable to criminals who might steal your banking or credit card information, governments who might want to eavesdrop on their citizens, and other internet users who might want to spy on you for a whole range of nefarious reasons.
A VPN creates a private tunnel over the open internet. The idea is that everything you send is encapsulated in this private communications channel and encrypted so — even if your packets are intercepted — they can’t be deciphered. VPNs are very powerful and important tools to protect yourself and your data, but they do have limitations.
A reason you might choose to use a VPN is if you have something to hide. This isn’t just about folks doing things they shouldn’t do. Sometimes people really need to hide information. Take, for example, the person who is worried he or she might be discriminated against by an employer because of a sexual preference or medical condition. Another example is a person who needs to go online but is concerned about revealing location information to a person in their life who might be a threat.
And then, of course, there are those people in restrictive countries who need to hide their activity merely to gain access to the internet without potentially grave penalties
Software engineering 