WLAN Will Surge in Asia

As Jupitermedia prepares its 802.11 Conference & Expo in Singapore, experts converging on the city are bullish on the prospects of the technology in the world's largest continent.

by Seng Li Peng of asia.internet.com [September 18, 2002]

According to IDC, revenues from wireless LAN sales in Asia (excluding Japan) will reach US$350 million by 2005, up from US$45 million in 2000, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 51 percent.

This is not pure hype, as vendors such as Gemtek Systems Inc., a company that designs and builds wireless products for Public Access providers, have found a ready market. "Organizations all over the world are increasingly looking at implementing WLAN," says Bonnie Cheong, Gemtek vice president of communications.

"In Asia, Japan and Korea have the highest WLAN adoption rate. While Japan is often at the forefront of new technologies, Korea sees WLAN as the easiest way to bring the last mile of broadband into the home," she adds.

The benefits associated with WLAN, designed to co-exist with wired networks rather than to replace them, are abundant. For example, it eliminates the labor costs associated with cabling and maintenance. Its "ease of use" is important, and it "allows users to be connected anytime and anyway ... enabling a true mobile workforce," Cheong says.

She adds that the WLAN connection in her office is faster than her ADSL connection at home. "This is one of the key success factors for WLAN while another is that it enables multiple users to simultaneously share the same medium."

Weaknesses exist
While it is a fact that WLAN adoption is on the rise, there are factors that limit its adoption. These include "shrinking IT budgets, unfamiliarity of WLAN technology, lack of 'killer applications,' and security threats, just to name a few," Cheong states.

Security threats are one of the top barriers for some corporations. As the current generation of WLANs is predominantly based on 802.11b, the authentication mechanism is based on the knowledge of a shared pre-installed key. "Unfortunately, pre-shared authentication keys are not a robust security mechanism and are susceptible to security attacks," says Mohan Atreya, technical consultant, Systems Engineering, Developer Solutions Group, RSA Security.

To make matters worse, some organizations view WLAN as secondary to the wired LAN and therefore have not put in place the stronger security needed, he adds.

One method of securing WLAN access is to run a Virtual Private Network (VPN), Atreya suggests. "This will protect the network traffic from eavesdroppers. Unfortunately, many small, handheld computers and devices attached to WLANs are not able to function as VPN clients due usually to the non-availability of ready VPN clients on many non-standard operating systems."

Another setback of VPN is that it may lower the performance of the wireless networks. In addition, VPN requires users to manually re-authenticate and set up a new VPN tunnel every time they roam between access points. This can prove cumbersome and users may avoid and ignore the VPN policies, Atreya explains.

Under such circumstances, users may look to Encrypted File Protection, a solution that entails simple encryption process with a password, as an alternative. This is a common method used to encrypt sensitive information on corporate laptops and can be extended to handheld devices and PDAs accessing the WLANs.

But whenever possible, "companies need to put security policies in place that require road warriors to use VPN clients and two-factor authentication when connecting to enterprise network form public hotspots. Without strong authentication, there is no way to distinguish between legitimate users and intruders who have stolen their laptops or handhelds," says Atreya.

Currently, RSA Security, together with Cisco and Microsoft, are working together on the new Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP) to tackle the roaming and authentication issues on WLAN. This protocol will enable roaming users to authenticate themselves via different mechanisms, including RSA SecurID tokens, smart cards, x.509 digital certificates, and even passwords.

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