Thesis Abstract

There have been remarkable growths in wireless communication networks in recent years; this is because of its merits over the wired networks such as Mobility and convenience. Wireless networks transmit the signal over the open air via radio waves of different frequencies, this makes it to be vulnerable to several attacks and anybody on the street can easily intercept the wireless data or inject new data into the entire network.

There has been existence of wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol (IEEE 802.11i), which was designed for wireless network security. There were concerns of security vulnerabilities in WEP; this made it necessary for the implementation of another solution to overcome the weaknesses of the previous wireless network security. The IEEE 802.1X (port-based network admission control) which is defined on Extensible Authentication protocol (EAP) provides effective and efficient admission control to wireless and other networks devices.

Our study investigates the efficiency of NAC (IEEE 802.1X) as a security solution, access different vendor solutions, protocols supported and look into the inter-operability of these various vendors. In as much as we support the premise of NAC being an excellent solution, we will also make brilliant recommendations in this thesis to be considered for future refinements of this security solution as well as deployment scenarios for the university network.

Thesis Overview