In a somewhat surprising article at ZDNet Asia, Steve Hurst, product director for managed security services at AT&T, has lots of juicy quotes proclaiming that Wi-Fi security is still not up to snuff. My favorite gem: “Wi-Fi devices are stupid devices that only pass data and do not authenticate users.” This would all make sense to me if he differentiated between open networks and more secure deployments within enterprises. Perhaps the author of the article tried to sensationalize things a bit, but the FUD quotient on this piece is off the chart.
For fun, contrast the ZDNet article with another recent article from SearchNetworking.com saying essentially the exact opposite. “Your wireless network, in many cases, is more secure than your wired network,” says Bill Terrill, senior analyst with Burton Group.
I think in order to be accurate in any assessment of the two technologies you need to consider the various vectors of threats. Confidentiality and authentication are subsets of overall security. So WLAN certainly has a better cryptographic profile than wired–at least until we see 802.1AE standardized and deployed. However, WLANs are certainly more vulnerable to interference attacks and other DoS based purely on the medium itself. Modern wired networks have the ability to ensure that one rogue actor can not easily render the entire network unusable. This is a much harder statement to make about WLAN.