Bitcricket

The IEEE 802.11n Draft Standard specifies a next generation wireless LAN (WLAN) technology promising nearly twice the reach and far better throughput than 802.11abg legacy devices.  The technology is very complex (the draft is over 470 pages long) and has evolved during the standards process with a history of battle lines between contributors.  The dust has settled and we are finally seeing real deliverable technology and interoperability.

This 16-page white paper takes a brief look at the history behind the process, the convergence to a draft standard, the promise of 802.11n, details on improvements in both transmission speed and protocol efficiency, and several major milestones pushing 802.11n into the enterprise.

Unique to this white paper is a look at 802.11n in action by capturing frames from an operational system using 40 MHz bandwidth, multiple antennas, and multiple streams.  Such capture and analysis takes us inside 802.11n operation, helping us to better understand how it works, especially new features such as block ACKs and aggregated frames.

Network forensics includes the recording and analysis of network events to figure out the nature and source of information abuse, security attacks, and other such incidents on your network. This is typically achieved by recording or capturing packets long term from a key point or points in your infrastructure (such as the core or firewall) and then data mining for analysis and recreating content.

This 8-page white paper looks at the many aspects of forensics ranging from compliance, to law enforcement, to user behavior. We briefly summarize findings from Carnegie Mellon that studied various forms of IT espionage and sabotage inside the enterprise. Requirements to consider in evaluating commercially available tools are examined. Finally, a practical example of using such a tool is demonstrated to detect anomalous activity.