Review of 802.11 Wireless Networks Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed by Matthew Gast. Wow, what an excellent book. From the review:

I tend not to read and review books on as broad a subject as "wireless networking." I've read and reviewed wireless security books like Real 802.11 Security and Wi-Foo, but 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed (8WN2E) was a departure for me. Thankfully, 8WN2E is an incredible book. It exceeded my expectations and definitely earned its "Definitive Guide" status.

In addition to the book, I recommend Matthew's blog posts Top Ten 802.11 Myths of 2005 and When Is 54 Not Equal to 54? A Look at 802.11a, b, and g Throughput.

One of the marks of a great book is authoritatively answering a question I've pondered for a while. For example, I've heard that the introduction of 802.11b stations into an 802.11g network means all stations run at 802.11b speeds. This is absolutely false.

On p 303 he says:

Only the protection frames are required to be transmitted at the 802.11b-compatible data rates. Protection does not require 802.11g stations to use a slower data rate for the payload data, as is commonly asserted.

Brilliant. I even added tabs to this book -- I hardly ever do that.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for the recommendation, wishlisted.

FWIW I was pretty disappointed by the O'Reilly Ethernet book. From memory it had only a page or two on VLANs - now an essential part of the Ethernet landscape.
5:49 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more