The practical risk assessment for enterprise Wireless Local Area Network

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are gaining more and more attention in enterprise. The advantages WLANs provide over wired LANs are mobility, range of coverage, ease of use, scalability, low cost and so on. In recent years, more and more enterprises set up WLANs environment in the information system. However, the introduction of the WLANs brings an additional exposed vulnerability point. The potential attackers may invade the information system through the vulnerability of WLANs. Risk assessment is a very efficient method to reduce the risk of information system to an acceptable level. In this paper, we study the security challenges in WLANs and give a practical method to assess the risk of WLANs. The owner of WLANs or risk assessor could enhance the security through appropriate countermeasures.