Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

WPA2 Now Available in NUS

It took a while for NUS to catch-up on the latest in wireless LAN security, but it finally did. WPA2 security is now available on the NUS wireless LAN. At least in most parts of campus. Definitely so in SoC areas (yeah, since we get to control that). It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time, but in the interest of presenting a consistent user experience across campus, we (in SoC) held back on pushing out WPA2 service on our wireless infrastructure. In an enterprise network, consistency in user experience is important… even if it means consistently delivering not-so-good services.

I think one of the biggest benefit, apart from the obvious IT security improvements, is the support of not-so-smart devices. Devices such as smart phones (which, ironically, aren’t that smart after all), which often have limited support for all the variants of wireless security protocols.

We used to use 802.1x LEAP (because when we embarked on wireless in a big way, there was only LEAP), then we moved on to 802.1x PEAP. The real PCs with full-fledged operating systems don’t have problems with any of these wireless security protocols. No so for the new breed of not-so-smart portable devices.

Now, we’ve pushed out WPA2 Enterprise… something that seems to be so much better supported by today’s smart phones. At least on my Nexus One, I can now configure the NUS SSID properly through the phone’s GUI… and not have to resort to editing a configuration file via a command-line shell.

5 thoughts on “WPA2 Now Available in NUS

    1. Hmm, not yet. It seems quite straight-forward now since it is done via the GUI. Will perhaps do up one when I have the time.

      1. Ok will try first, a couple of other students doing Android apps for class this sem which needs to pass UDP packets around.

  1. Hi,

    A friend of mine gave me your link and said that you could help me out with NUS network on my android. I am using HTC Desire on android 2.2 and I wish to connect to the NUS network and forgo the hassle of logging in every time i connect to NUSOPEN. But I do not wish to root my phone. So I was wondering if you could guide me to setup the NUS network on my phone.

    Thank you.

    1. If you have WPA2 service in your area, you should pretty much be able to configure via the phone’s interface directly, no need for rooting. However, i understand WPA2 isn’t considered production yet (it’s okay in SoC since we run the network autonomously).

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