Siemens building compliance into Wi-Fi

InfoWorld - Siemens will announce this week HiPath Wireless Advanced, a management package for its family of Wi-Fi LAN products.

The solution follows the trend of adding reporting functionality for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and Department of Defense Directive 8100.2, among other government regulations.

The solution comes with predefined business rules for such requirements and checks the data against those rules to determine conformity to the regulations.

The channels on which the data was running, encrypted data, and other access points that were available but not on the system might be of interest to a government audit.

Siemens is licensing its compliance technology from AirTight Networks.

While assuring compliance with multiple regulations is becoming more important, Richard Conover, research director for Current Analysis, said the quality of the embedded business rules that check for compliance are only as good as the person who wrote them.

"The question you need to ask is if the vendor has gone through the process of going to an outside firm to verify that they meet all the regulations or can they provide some level of assurance that they meet these regulations," Conover said.

Siemens also added additional levels of security to the HiPath Wireless Advanced solution.

Rather than shutting down a port when a rogue device is detected or using a denial of service attack against a rogue AP, both of which would reduce network availability for all legitimate users, the Siemens software sends a disassociate command to a rogue AP every time a legitimate client mistakenly tries to connect to it.

The intrusion protection and prevention capabilities also secure for the first time both the radio space and the packets across the network.

Instead of using a centralized switch to manage APs, Siemens will use what it calls a thin AP architecture with a controller. The controller is a Layer 3 solution, working at the IP level. The software creates a tunnel from the AP to the controller.

"This is a plug-and-play solution. A network manager can configure the AP when it connects to the network," said Luc Roy, vice president of product planning.

HiPath Wireless Advanced is available now.