You are the network administrator for ABC Company. Your manager has recently attended a wireless security seminar. The seminar speaker taught that a…

The response that you should give to your manager’s suggestion of implementing the security

practices of disabling the broadcasting of the SSID in Beacons and configuring the access points not

to respond to Probe Request frames that have a null SSID field is that any 802.11 protocol analyzer

can see the SSID in clear text in frames other than Beacons frames. This negates any security benefit

of trying to hide the SSID in Beacons and Probe Response frames. The SSID (Service Set Identifier) is a

human-readable name that identifies a WLAN and allows users to connect to it. The SSID is

transmitted in clear text in several types of 802.11 frames, such as Beacon frames, Probe Request

frames, Probe Response frames, Association Request frames, Association Response frames,

Reassociation Request frames, and Reassociation Response frames. Some people may think that

hiding the SSID can improve the security of the WLAN by making it invisible to potential intruders.

However, this is not true, as hiding the SSID only removes it from Beacon frames and Probe Response

frames that have a null SSID field. The SSID is still present in other types of frames that can be easily

captured and analyzed by any 802.11 protocol analyzer or wireless scanner tool. Therefore, hiding

the SSID does not provide any real security benefit and may even cause some compatibility and

performance issues for legitimate users. Reference: 1, Chapter 4, page 133; 2, Section 4.1