Secure Wireless Access to Services in Enterprise Networks

Modern enterprise networks offer a wide variety of wireless connectivity to their recognized users, thereby enabling them to work in geographically distributed offices, including on the premises of their business partners. In practical terms, this often requires the integration of heterogeneous wireless access solutions, heterogeneous security mechanisms, and a decentralized autonomous management of security. For instance, IT workers in multinational companies, usually move between different, possibly geographically distributed, departments of the same company, or sometimes visit the offices of a collaborating company with well-established business relationships. All these networks have Wi-Fi access points with different implementations, as well as enterprise-level Bluetooth or WiMAX base stations from different vendors. Furthermore, the security policies for each sub-network are usually adopted independently of the others taking into account the constraints and requirements of only one administrative environment. Thus, security management is done autonomously in each locality. This integrated scenario poses novel and challenging security issues. In addition to the well-known low-layer vulnerabilities due to the nature of wireless access, the additional challenges include the secure discovery and access to enterprise resources and services. In other words, the design assumptions of traditional enterprise networks, where users were assumed to be mostly sedentary, will have to be re-examined. The main thesis of this chapter is that novel approaches to secure wireless access to services must take into account the operational and environmental context in the personalization of security/service provisioning over enterprise networks. A review of security in enterprise wireless networks, with a specific focus on secure discovery and secure access control, would give a guide to the advantages and disadvantages of each solution in practical situations. It also reveals the open challenges that remain to be solved in order to make these solutions ready for the industrial market and for their wide-scale exploitation