Wireless Options for the Production Building

Networking

Wireless Options for the Production Building

Lake View Chemicals has made the decision to implement a new wireless networking option for their production building. The requirement to move between different locations within their building to utilize more versatile portable computers as opposed to being mired at fixed workstations is the main objective. As an IT consultant for Aspen IT Services, I feel that as Lake View Chemicals explores the use of wireless networking because of their need for staff members in the production building to be mobile, certain requirements must be met. This short report aims to meet that need but it also explains some concerns. An assessment of what the company does is essential to create a viable recommendation.

The company produces chemicals for both industrial and pharmaceutical companies. Their campus consists of three buildings, an administration building (management, financial, and sales), a research building (contains laboratories, scientists, and engineers) and the production building (used for manufacturing chemical products and for shipping). The existing network consists of a reliable twisted-pair cable setup inside each building and a secure fiber-optic cable tying the buildings together as well as the floors within the buildings. Lake View Chemicals has specialized manufacturing and chemical processes that have been patented and has an extensive research and development process in order to create new products. The company considers its existing research team to be one of the best in the industry and therefore considers its research secrets critical to company survival and success.

After an extensive search of academic journals, trade publications, and other related magazines in regard to wireless networking, this report takes into consideration the business's applications and some technical details. There is little doubt that establishing a wireless network on the campus would not entail a great deal of physical effort. The real problem for Lake View Chemicals is that in this highly competitive globalized economy, a critical topic in the data communications and networking area has become network and data security. External competition is not the company's only concern because of the industry they are in. Terrorism has also become a major concern for companies that produce medicines and chemical compounds that could be used as weapons.

As Lake View Chemicals adds wireless technology into their infrastructure, they also need to verify that they institute reliable management capabilities into their network. "On a wired network, authentication is implicit in the connection to the network itself. Data ports on the walls almost always go to the real network infrastructure, and altering traffic as it traverses the wire is difficult. Wireless networks, however, have a very different physical topology. It is much easier to inject messages into an authentication sequence or hijack authorized sessions in the absence of strong mutual authentication and integrity checks." (Gast) Network security that incorporates the internet and internal networked environments need to solve three main issues. "Three basic security concepts important to information on the Internet are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Concepts relating to the people who use that information are authentication, authorization, and nonrepudiation." (Dekker) The system must be able to perform well in the areas of security, network availability and performance.

Wireless infrastructures are notorious for blatant security leaks in real time so any new system would need to be able to clearly identify new network intrusions in order to reduce network operating issues. "It's depressing how often we see that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it. When cordless phones and the first analog cell phones hit the market, anybody with a scanner that operated at the right frequency could easily listen to calls not intended for them." (Gast) Again, it is critical for Lake View Chemicals to understand, security is a huge concern in wireless technology. The concerns can be minimized, not eliminated, if the wireless communications are contained in a single building. But, if a campus wide process is implemented, concerns would be made worse. The reason is that there are many well-known security weaknesses in the existing Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology which is the main standard in most wireless technology. This is how the three buildings would most likely be connected. The technology leaves a type of security hole that can then expose data through the encryption process at a wireless carrier's WAP gateway. Lake View Chemicals would need to monitor a large amount of data traffic that would suddenly be coming into their three building a databases from all of the new wireless devices that would or could be spread over the different campus locations. Lake View Chemicals' security engineers would need to be aware of many types of attacks. "Incidents can be broadly classified into several kinds: the probe, scan, account compromise, root compromise, packet sniffer, denial of service, exploitation of trust, malicious code, and Internet infrastructure attacks." (Dekker) This new requirement could become very expensive to say the least.