Well, in general, with any kind of wireless system, you are broadcasting the data that you send. Its there for everyone to listen to if they wish, without your knowldge.

Hence, you should be using encryption. The earlier standard, WEP (Wired Equivalency Protocol) is a very light, low level encryption that is easily broken by someone who wants to see your traffic. Its still better than nothing though.

If you want REAL encryption, you ned to get a router and cards that support WPA-PSK (Wireless Protected Access-Pre Shared Key), which will encrypt your data (usually) using AES-128, the current government stnard for encryption.

All Buffalo Technologies Product offers this type of Security!  I highly recommend all Buffalo Tech Products.  If you do setup a Wireless Network, Make sure that you turn off SSID Broadcast, and setup at least Mac Address Filtering since this will keep computers out of your network that you don't want on your network. 

Lance R.

Actually, any newly WiFi certified procduct supports WPA...its part of the certification requirement. In general, turning of SSID broadcast wont help you gain anymore security if you have MAC filtering enabled.

Thanks a lot for the help guys. Information is always a good thing. I think thats what I love about online forums.

So the encryption is just configured into the routers packet broadcast ?

Correct - if you enable WPA, the router does internal encryption on every frame sent.

And with sniffer software and a few hours, it is easy to capture then spoof the MAC security, wep key, and SSID name.  WPA is supposed to help allieviate that hacking.