Security and Privacy in an IT Context — A Low-Cost WIDS Employed Against MITM Attacks (Concept)

Contemporary rates of WiFi (802.11) adoption have turned the technology into an oft-underestimated source of potential security breaches. Even though the lay user base typically feels protected by employing basic encryption (first WEP, then WPA and currently WPA2), the truth is that it is trivially easy to perform a multitude of attacks on typical home and small business setups. This paper will cover the danger of a MITM1) attack as well as fairly straightforward steps one might take to prevent such intrusions by implementing a basic WIDS 2 setup with off-the-shelf hardware and open source software.