Abstract: Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are cost effective and desirable gateways to mobile computing. They allow computers to be mobile, cable less and communicate with speeds close to the speeds of wired LANs. These features came with expensive price to pay in areas of security of the network. This paper distinguishes and outlines these security concerns and their answers. Extensively, security worries in the WLAN world are arranged into physical and legitimate. The paper outlines both physical and consistent WLANs security issues pursued by a survey of the primary advancements used to defeat them. It tends to coherent security assaults like manin-the-center assault and Denial of Service assaults just as physical security assaults like rouge APs. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was the primary coherent answer for secure WLANs. Hiwever, WEP endured numerous issues which were incompletely settled by IEEE802.1x convention. Towards flawlessness in verifying WLANs, IEEE802.11i developed as another MAC layer standard which forever fixes the greater part of the security issues found in WEP and other transitory WLANs security arrangements. This paper audits all security arrangements beginning from WEP to IEEE802.11i and talks about the quality and shortcoming of these arrangements.

Keywords: WLAN, remote LAN, security, IEEE802.11