Wireless Security and Monitoring for the Home Network

Home wireless users and security professionals the world over need to find a way to provide a secure working environment. There are two distinct approaches to this security dilemma: security prevention and security detection. An example of security prevention would be a firewall device that restricts specific traffic or ports to or from specific hosts. Although this provides protection against unauthorized traffic, it has no means for determining if an attack is being attempted via an authorized port. An example of security detection would be an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) device that contains a signature to identify a specific attack via authorized or unauthorized ports. Security professionals often have the technology and resources to develop security solutions based on both prevention and detection. However, home wireless users do not have the luxury of evaluating their security approach since the guidelines and wireless devices marketed to the home user have an overwhelming dependency on preventative mechanisms. This document will briefly review the basic home access point security mechanisms and its weaknesses. Then it will cover the implementation of a script to detect, identify, and provide notification of users on a home wireless network, as an attempt at security detection.