Securing Your Wireless Access Point: What Do All Those Settings Mean Anyways?

This paper started out as a reference guide for users at my place of employment to secure their wireless LANs. After researching wireless security, and seeing that it is not the most secure platform out of the box, I decided to create a step by step guide for users to be able to secure their wireless networks at home. I had an eight page document that was basically screen shots with brief descriptions of how to lock down a Linksys wireless router and a wireless Linksys network interface card. A friend of mine reviewed the document and asked what all of the settings really meant. After hearing that, I thought that this would be a great paper to build upon and answer some of these questions for myself as well as others who were making these changes without really knowing why they were doing them. There are currently a lot of worries about wireless security.