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Wireless Security

With the convenience of wireless technologies comes a new host of security problems. Unlike a wired network ”where security involves limiting physical access to routers, hubs, and cables ”a wireless network's most vulnerable point (the radio waves beaming through the air) has no physical substance. This makes security a challenging task.

In this book, we will take a look at the various ways to secure wireless networks, using standards such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), 802.1x, and 802.11i. We will also look at the security features found in the Bluetooth and Infrared technologies. Chapter 5 discusses how to communicate securely.

Conventions Used in This Book

The screenshots (and their accompanying descriptions) in this book are mainly from Mac OS X 10.3, also known as Panther. In most cases, you'll find that the descriptions will still work fine for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

This book uses the following abbreviations:

Hz, kHz, MHz, and GHz: Hertz (cycles per second), kilohertz (one thousand hertz), megahertz (one million hertz), and gigahertz (one billion, or 10 ⁹ hertz)
bps, kbps, Mbps: Bits per second, kilobits (1024 bits) per second, and megabits (1,048,576 bits) per second
KB/s, MB/s: Kilobytes (1024 bytes) per second and megabytes (1,048.576 bytes) per second

This book uses the following typographic conventions:

Constant width: Constant width is used for listing the output of command-line utilities.
Italic: Italic is used for emphasis, for first use of a technical term , and for example URLs.
.. .: Ellipses indicate text that has been omitted for clarity.

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Comments and Questions

Please address any comments or questions concerning this book to the publisher:

O'Reilly & Associates

1005 Gravenstein Highway North

Sebastopol, CA 95472

800-998-9938 (in the U.S. or Canada)

707-829-0515 (international or local)

707-829-0104 (fax)

To ask technical questions or comment on the book, send email to:

bookquestions@oreilly.com

O'Reilly has a web site for this book where examples, errata, and any plans for future editions are listed. You can access this site at:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/macxunwire/

The authors also maintain a companion web site for the book, with news about the wireless world and information about the book, at:

http://www.macosxunwired.com/

For more information about other O'Reilly books, see the O'Reilly web site:

http://www.oreilly.com

Readers who would like to contact the authors with questions or comments are welcome to do so at:

book@macosxunwired.com

Acknowledgements

The authors (Tom and Dori) would like to thank the following people and organizations for their help with this book:

Our biggest thanks go to our co-author , Wei Meng Lee, author of Windows XP Unwired , also from O'Reilly. He helped us out by writing some of the knottier chapters, specifically Chapter 5, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8. We deeply appreciate his technical expertise, as well as his fast help on a difficult schedule.

Our editor, Brian Jepson, deserves much of the credit for the way this book turned out. His knowledge of all the technologies involved, plus the fact that he's a total cellphone geek, have made the book much better.

Our thanks to ORA's Chuck Toporek for bringing us into this project. Thanks also to our agent, Studio B's Neil J. Salkind, for putting us together with Chuck, and for seeing the contract negotiations through.

We would also like to thank our technical reviewer, R. Emory Lundberg, for making our work better.

Chris Stone and Pascal Honscher at ORA helped us out by shooting a picture for this book late in the production process. Many thanks to them, and also to Jessamyn Read, who prepared the photo for print under tight deadline.

Our love and thanks to our son, Sean Smith (who made more than one dinner for himself when his parents were working late), for his support and patience.

Dori would like to thank the W&S ladies for their loving kindness and virtual hugs, and the Wise-Women's Web community at http://www. wise-women .org/ for their depth of knowledge and inspiration.

Thanks to our colleague Glenn Fleishman for pointers and connections.

This book covers various products from many vendors . There is no way that we could have purchased all of the software and hardware we reviewed, so we'd like to express our gratitude to the following people and companies who loaned us some:

Nancy Koprowski of Maples Communication
Jenice Sakai of Linksys
Melody Chalaban of Belkin Corporation
Apple Computer's WWPM Seeding Lab
Joanne Hwang and Cori Locklin of JABRA Corporation
Dr. Bott, LLC
Rick Estes of QuickerTek, Inc
Jonas Salling of Salling Software AB

The soundtrack for this book was graciously provided (in Tom's office, at least) by Liz Phair, Aaron Copland, Lucy Kaplansky, Warren Zevon (RIP), Evanescence, Patty Griffin, Michelle Branch, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

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