Security

The wireless network is protected by a secure authentication system. Users need to log in to access most resources on campus.

Since wireless networks transmit information over radio frequencies, information can be intercepted by others. For example, using a "sniffer", a program or device that captures all traffic on a local area network (LAN), someone can see your email, password, URLs visited, and content of text messages.

Network-level Security

To protect your personal information, we strongly encourage the use of encryption. For wireless users, the connection between your computer and the wireless access point can be secured by using the 802.1x protocol. 802.1x provides SSL-protected authentication, as well as dynamic encryption keys to prevent someone from intercepting information sent over your wireless connection. To use 802.1x:

• Windows users must download and install the AEGIS client software.
• Mac OS X users must configure their wireless connection to use 802.1x.

Application Security

In addition to network level security, you can use applications that do their own encryption to secure your personal information. For example, when browsing the web, sites doing sensitive transactions will use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt information sent between you and the web server. Sites using SSL will have a URL starting in "https://" instead of "http://".

Some other internet applications that use encryption are:

• SSH: Secure Shell is used instead of Telnet and to tunnel some protocols.
• SFTP: Secure FTP, usually part of an SSH client, is used instead of FTP.
• SPOP: Secure POP is used instead of POP to protect your email.
• IMAPS: Secure IMAP is used instead of IMAP to protect your email.