Considering stepping up to Wireless-N Router

[Daryus]

As I say in the title, I'm looking at bumping up to a Wireless-N router with 4 Ethernet ports available. Recent developments in compputer security show that the WEP and TKIP 128-bit encryption I've been using isn't as secure as I'd like for my network.

I've been comparing different products, I've used Linksys all my life, setting up multiple networks with them. The WRT150N router looks to fit most of my needs, however it only uses WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption. I'm not very familiar with WPA2, but I figure 256-bit WPA2 should be pretty much impregnable except against the most determined attack.

I guess the reason I'm posting here is because they offer another router:theWRT330N.
It has AES encryption alongside WEP and WPA. Is AES encryption strong? I can't find much about it, beyond the US gov't using it to protect Secret documents. Everyone knows kids at a local coffee shop routinely hack the DoD, so how good could it be? (j/k). I guess I'm on a quest to try and have the best router to protect my business records and still maintain a solid network for the other wireless-enabled PCs in the shop. Would I have to buy new wireless adapters for my other PCs to use AES? For that matter, WPA2 probably needs new hardware on all of them as well.

I figured there are a lot of folks here who do computer work for their part-time jobs (FFXI first, amirite?), so maybe someone could offer me an idea of which way to go hardware and encryption-wise.

 

[CmdrFly]

Do they support Dynamic WEP?

This is an extension to WEP that basically rotates the key every _ minutes (probably want to set it to 2-5min). This would make it fairly difficult as someone sitting outside your restaurant would have to crack the key, insert it to their config, connect to the network, then repeat all of the above 60 seconds later.

I've heard very little about AES but I read a little about the algorithm and god damn was I confused.

The best possible thing you could do though is isolate it. Keep your critical systems that have business-sensitive material completely disconnected from the wireless network. Have one Internet connection to the building for your registered workstations to access the Internet, and another connection strictly for your business systems and hard-wired to all endpoints.

 

[Arctyrael]

Just use WPA. I don't believe (I could be wrong) it has been cracked yet.