Air Tight Networks SS-300-AT-C-60

Air Tight Networks SS-300-AT-C-60

A Wireless Intrusion Prevention System.

AirTight C-60 Access Point is a Wireless Intrusion Prevention System that allows enterprises to have a WiFi access solution which can protect their network from wireless threats

To help you understand this product better, consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1

Consider an organization with connectivity provided through LAN and there is no Wi-Fi. In such a situation IT administration can't think of an attack by a hacker in the vicinity of the organization. However, there are employees who bring their own devices like laptop and smartphone. An employee for some reason converts his laptop into a hotspot or an access point (AP). In this situation an outsider can connect to this hotspot and can access the organizations network.

Scenario 2

Consider a bank (or any organization) with ‘no Wi-Fi' policy in place. Employees either bring their own devices or use the banks PCs. Now an employee makes his system an access point and connects his smartphone or tablet to this AP. And the smartphone or the tablet gets infected by virus and an outsider hacks into this AP and get access to the bank's network.

Scenario 3

A hacker in the vicinity of an organization creates a hotspot by the similar name which the organization has already created. Now employees of that organization get unknowingly connected to this network. You can imagine the possibilities that this can create.

In all above scenarios, whether there is a Wi-Fi or no Wi-Fi policy, security gets compromised. In such cases, Wi-Fi security is needed that can block the unwanted connections.

Here, we review one such device called C-60 by AirTight Networks. It acts an AP and a WIPS sensor and has 802.11n platform based dual band and dual radios.

The installation was quiet easy. We just plugged in the device to an Internet enabled port and using the login credentials we logged into the console (basically on the cloud server). Dashboard was pretty clean and and you can even customize it. Now we tried to set up the policies for Wi-Fi where we wanted to check whether it can prevent the unauthorized or rogue APs. So we set up three APs including a smartphone with the Internet connectivity. When we checked the dashboard it recognized all the APs in its vicinity including the three APs that we set up. Now we labeled the smartphone as a rogue AP. So when we tried to connect to the phone's connection (that it was transmitting) we were unable to connect to the Internet, which means it successfully blocked that smartphone (AP). If the floor plan is provided then it can also give you the location of the AP. This device can said to be BYOD enabled by providing a list of the smart devices (authorization) that connects to the enterprise network.

Other features included are QoS, Firewall, NAT-ing giving a capability of creating VLANs.The types of attack that it is able to prevent are Rogue APs, Honeypot AP attacks or MITM, Misconfigured Authorized APs, Mis-associated clients, MAC spoofing of APs and Clients, DoS attack mitigation, Soft Rogue APs and Ad-Hoc.