Keeping Data Intact

One of the advantages of 802.11b is that it ensures that your data transmission
remains intact as it follows the wireless path between the wireless
workstation and the access point. The idea of this level of security is
to reject any message transmission that may have been modified or
intentionally altered during its path from point to point.
To maintain privacy, the 802.11 standard was designed specifically to
reject any message altered in transit, either by accident or by design. To
ensure that data privacy has been maintained, the cyclic redundancy
check (CRC) technique is used as a form of encryption. This setup
requires that each encrypted packet is “sealed” in a bubble using the

RC4 key encryption to scramble the transmission. Only when the packets
are received are they decrypted; a CRC check is computed to ensure
that it matches the CRC value before it was sent. Should the CRC value
not match, then you have a receive error that defines an integrity violation
and the packet is thrown away as corrupt.