An Extensive Review of Wireless Local Area Network Security Standards

During recent times, wireless local area network is very important and changed to a vital topic since the World Wide Web was introduced in 1995; we have many types of wireless network such as wireless local area network, wireless communication, wireless application protocol (WAP), wireless transaction and WMAN. Among all these types, WLAN gained much popularity and used widely in today’s world in many areas for different purposes: office, airport, library, university, hospital, military campus and many more. In another hand, the security of all these functionalities has become a crucial topic in today’s WLAN due to not existing any physical border around WLAN channel, so that, the security of information can be leaked by attackers very easy. For these purposes, IEEE introduced very famous security standards like WEP, WPA and WPA2 for securing communication between two endpoints. This survey gives a brief introduction to types of WLAN security, to study types of attack in wireless LAN, the vulnerabilities, and study on the existing security standards and will focus more on WPA2 which fix the problem of WEP and WPA and then explore the vulnerability of each standard; finally, this paper will end up with some useful mitigation and suggestion how to improve the wireless LAN security.