Building A Secure Access Service Edge. Can you imagine having a secure access service edge at home or office where you can connect all devices securely without using passwords? Sounds too good to be true? Well, it isn’t! There are several ways to implement such solutions. This article shares some practical and straightforward tips on how to build a secure access solution.
To begin with, it is very important to understand the difference between a service edge and a service provider. The service provider is the party that is responsible for providing network connectivity and services to the end-user.
The service provider can be a service provider or an internet service provider (ISP). On the other hand, a service edge is part of the network. Further, that provides connectivity to your computer, router, or any other device.
Understanding this basic distinction will help you understand how to build a secure access solution at home or office. The most common place where you will have to connect your device to access the internet is your local area network (LAN). It is also what we call your home network. Therefore, we will focus on building a secure access solution for your home network.
Planning Your Secure Access Solution
The first step toward building a secure access service edge at home or office is to plan how you intend to implement such a solution. You can do this in several ways using various hardware and software solutions.
However, if you are looking for an inexpensive and cost-effective way to build a secure access solution for your home network, then you should go for a hardware-based solution using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2).
The steps you will need to follow
1. Make sure that all devices that are going to be part of your secure access solution are WPA2-compliant devices. If they are not, then upgrade them immediately. This will ensure that all devices can communicate with each other seamlessly without any security issues.
2. Plug in an Ethernet cable from your router or modem into each Wi-Fi capable device you have in your home network. This helps ensure that all devices connect via LAN and use WPA2 as their security protocol instead of connecting through Wi-Fi Directly and compromising on security.
This also ensures that they do not fall back on older protocols such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).
3. Make sure you have a router or a modem that supports WPA2 or WPA2-Enterprise. If you have an older router or modem, then you will have to upgrade them to support WPA2. This is not an expensive proposition and you can easily get a new Wi-Fi router for about $50.
4. Make sure your router is configured to broadcast the service set identifier (SSID) in a hidden mode. This will ensure that only devices on the same Wi-Fi network can detect the SSID of your home network and connect to it.
Remember that this does not prevent people from connecting to your network if they know your SSID, but it does make it inconvenient for them because they will have to reconfigure their wireless card settings to connect to your network.
Steps in Building A Secure Access Service Edge
5. Make sure you are using the latest version of security protocols such as TLS 1.2 and AES 256-bit encrypted protocols for encrypting traffic between devices on your home network and servers on the internet. This helps ensure that no one can decrypt traffic between devices on your home network and servers on the internet and snoop into the content being transmitted between them.
6. Disable any wireless protocols other than WPA2 if any other protocol is being used on your home network to ensure that all devices connected through Wi-Fi use the WPA2 security protocol without fail!
7. Once all these preparations are completed, make sure to keep a record of all device IDs, password configurations, and channel numbers used by each device on your home network in case you ever need to track down someone snooping into the content being transmitted between devices connected on your home network and servers on the internet!
You should also talk with neighbors about setting up similar secure access solutions at their end as well so that all nearby Wi-Fi networks use similar security protocols such as WPA2!