Wireless WAN standard gets industry backing
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 126 KB
- Volume
- 2001
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1353-4858
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✦ Synopsis
Wireless WAN standard gets industry backing
Big IT companies including IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP and Cisco have spoken in support of the wireless WAN 802.1x standard from IEEE.
The standard enables interoperable identification, authentication and dynamic key management.
It also enables per-session keys to be generated alongside the usual system of periodic authentication, helping to improve security by preventing the process from becoming stale.
Microsoft is set to include the standard in the beta 2 version of Windows XP. It will also offer customer support for the standard to Windows 2000 users. Bill Rossi from Cisco's wireless networking division said that this "is the first implementation of the 802.1x draft security standard shipping today, and delivers the complete wireless security that will drive the digital renaissance."
Microsoft claims that the strength of its application of the standard in XP will be in the ease of networking for the end user. Jerry Meerkatz at Compaq said that the move would drive the industry towards "ubiquitous, high speed, wireless connectivity for the stateless user."
Dell spokesperson, Tim Peters said, "Notebooks will have the capacity to roam seemlessly...quickly and automatically resuming secure connections."
According to a statement by Microsoft, 802.1x is an exten-sion of existing standards, making it compatible with management and accounting tools such as RADIUS, Kerberos and LDAP-based directories. This implies that corporations should find it faster and cheaper to deploy because of the lack of implementation difficulties.