What is the future of WiFi (from a network security standpoint)
8 comments
·January 8, 2025mmooss
aeonik
You can multiplex by frequency as well.
Also, modern wireless systems can even multiplex by location, using phased arrays, it will beam a spotlight of radio to your direction, and can noisy data from receiving phase information as well.
mmooss
How are those different than the multiple radios and beam forming (oops, I see I wrote something else) that I mentioned? I'm not being snarky; I'm trying to learn what I'm missing. Thanks.
kbolino
WiFi is a shared medium, but shared medium and circuit-switced are not the same thing. WiFi uses packets and conforming devices do not block other devices for any longer than the time to send a packet.
dostick
Also can be said in half of words, “The Future of Wi-Fi security”
transpute
Per-device wifi passwords can be used on networks that don't have 802.11x.
Joel_Mckay
Kerberos and VPN like any other public network, and quantum-resistant ciphers.
Also, some beam-steering tricks that likely won't be available in the US for another 5 years... =3
Eingrand1978
[flagged]
It's been awhile since I had to think about Wifi on a serious level.
Last I knew: Due to the nature of the medium (radio waves), wifi was a 'circuit-switched' network - any two devices communicating monopolized the entire network. That is, unlike a switched wired network, only two devices can communicate at once (usually an endpoint and a base station).
More devices using the network, which of course was usually necessary, required some sort of time-division multiplexing - the network needed to slice up circuit access by time. The only other solutions were multiple networks, which were created with multiple radios on different frequencies, and [edit: beam forming], which created different networks to different physical locations - if that actually worked in practice.
Has anything changed? Are there new solutions to the circuit-switching limitation? Has someone managed to turn wireless into a packet-switched network?