Wireless Security Architecture

CHAPTER 2Understanding Technical Elements

Now that we've covered the foundational concepts of security and wireless domains, we'll take a deeper dive into the specific elements, starting with a more technical explanation of wireless infrastructure and management architecture, their impact on data paths, and how that impacts security architecture.

After that, we get into the more technical nuances of wireless security profiles including WPA2 and WPA3, followed by an intimate look into authentication and authorization schema in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 includes considerations for network domain services for wireless as well as a section on non-security Wi-Fi design elements that impact our security architecture, such as roaming protocols and designs for resiliency.

Understanding Wireless Infrastructure and Operations

The first topics to explore are the options for wireless infrastructure and management, and specifically what that means in terms of the data and control planes. Later in the chapter we'll also look more deeply at the data paths specifically for client traffic, and how that impacts security. For now, you'll just get an architecture overview and general teaser for the data path conversation to come.

The history of wireless architectures has been quite cyclic—just like client applications have moved from mainframes to distributed computing, back to centralized light virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies—so, too, has wireless followed the cycle of heavy→light→heavy, ...