ZyXEL Communications NWA-3160 - V3.70 Manual page 309

The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security
methods available on your NWA.
Table 90 Wireless Security Levels
SECURITY
LEVEL
Least
Secure
Most Secure
Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the NWA and on all
wireless clients that you want to associate with it.
IEEE 802.1x
In June 2001, the IEEE 802.1x standard was designed to extend the features of
IEEE 802.11 to support extended authentication as well as providing additional
accounting and control features. It is supported by Windows XP and a number of
network devices. Some advantages of IEEE 802.1x are:
• User based identification that allows for roaming.
• Support for RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service, RFC 2138,
2139) for centralized user profile and accounting management on a network
RADIUS server.
• Support for EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol, RFC 2486) that allows
additional authentication methods to be deployed with no changes to the access
point or the wireless clients.
RADIUS
RADIUS is based on a client-server model that supports authentication,
authorization and accounting. The access point is the client and the server is the
RADIUS server. The RADIUS server handles the following tasks:
• Authentication
Determines the identity of the users.
NWA-3160 Series User's Guide
SECURITY TYPE
Unique SSID (Default)
Unique SSID with Hide SSID Enabled
MAC Address Filtering
WEP Encryption
IEEE802.1x EAP with RADIUS Server
Authentication
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
WPA2
Appendix A Wireless LANs
309