Most home routers have a WiFi network for guests, which will allow us to connect different WiFi clients that do not have access to the main wired or wireless network. The purpose of guest WiFi networks is to be able to provide a password for an additional wireless network, and that this network does not have access to the main network, to protect the communications of the main network. However, it is also recommended to keep the guest WiFi network secure, to prevent them from consuming the bandwidth of our Internet connection. Today at RedesZone we are going to explain what you can do to maintain the security of the WiFi network for guests, because it is also very important to keep it under control.
Risks if you give the main WiFi key
When we receive guests in our house, they will generally ask us for the password of the WiFi network to be able to connect to the Internet and not spend the data rate of their mobile terminals. It is a fairly common practice in our country to ask for the WiFi password, and even offer the connection as good hosts. Of course, we should never provide the WPA2 or WPA3 password of the main network, because we run several security risks if we do:
- any guest could connect to the main network and communicate with any device on the main network.
- they could make us man in the middle attacks actively, capturing all the traffic and modifying it on the fly, compromising our privacy and security.
- If the one connecting has a malware on your device, it could spread inadvertently to the rest of the devices on the network, since they will have communication without any limitation. If we have a NAS server with all our files, it could be infected too.
For all these reasons, it is absolutely necessary to enable the guest WiFi network in our router, so that they do not have access to the main network of our home.
Security tips for the guest WiFi network
Now that we are clear that it is essential to enable a guest WiFi network in our home, below, you can find a series of important recommendations that you must follow:
- Enable the guest WiFi network with a access password, either WPA2 or WPA3. Never enable WiFi network and leave it unprotected.
- Make sure that the wireless clients on the guest network they do not have communication with the computers of the main network. This feature is called “Net Isolation”, ie network-level isolation of clients.
- check if there is isolation between WiFi clients of the guest network, to protect them from themselves. In this way, we can check if our router has the functionality of AP Isolation.
Other measures that you can take in the guest WiFi network are:
- If this network is not in use, disable it until the next guest arrives. Today most routers have an app, and we can do the same from the mobile.
- Periodically change the password of access of the guest network, so that whenever they want to connect we know it. Of course, the key should never be the same as the main network.
- Limit client access with MAC filtering to guest network. Although this measure does not provide much security, it can be useful to limit which clients can or cannot connect.
- Activate the bandwidth throttling on clientsso that they do not take over all the bandwidth of our Internet connection.
- Periodically check if there is any guest connected to our wireless network, in principle there should be none, but it is better to check it.
As you can see, it is not only very important to use the guest WiFi network to avoid potential security problems, but it is also necessary to make a series of security recommendations.
