Network Security

The recent wave of new mesh router systems has brought with it changes besides the obvious increase in Wi-Fi range. For example, these mesh routers are more likely to insist on WPA2-AES encryption, as many have dropped support for the less secure WEP and WPA options. Not all of them, but many.

Here I take a look at another insecure router technology, WPS (Wi-Fi protected setup) and how these new mesh routers deal with it. 

WPS is an alternate way of gaining access to a Wi-Fi network that does away with having to know the SSID (network name) and password. Much of what you read about WPS is incomplete, as it supports at least four different modes of operation.

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The recent wave of new mesh router systems has brought with it changes besides the obvious increase in Wi-Fi range. For example, these mesh routers are more likely to insist on WPA2-AES encryption, as many have dropped support for the less secure WEP and WPA options. Not all of them, but many.

Here I take a look at another insecure router technology, WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) and how these new mesh routers deal with it. 

WPS is an alternate way of gaining access to a Wi-Fi network that does away with having to know the SSID (network name) and password. Much of what you read about WPS is incomplete, as it supports at least four different modes of operation.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A VPN is simply an encrypted connection between two computers, each side running VPN software. The two sides, however, are not equal.

The software that you, as the user of a VPN service deal with, is known as the VPN client. The software run by a VPN company is a VPN server. The encrypted connection always starts with a VPN client making a request to a VPN server.

There are many different flavors of VPN connections, each with its own corresponding client and server software. The most popular flavors are probably L2TP/IPsec, OpenVPN, IKEv2 and PPTP.

Some VPN providers support only one flavor, others are much more flexible. Astrill, for example, supports OpenWeb, OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP, Cisco IPSec, IKEv2, SSTP, StealthVPN and RouterPro VPN. At the other extreme, OVPN, as their name implies, only supports OpenVPN.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here