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I was setting up my friends Linksys WRT54G router at his home. As soon as connected the router with the computer and open the setup CD which came alongwith it, I came across with certain terms whose meaning I didn't know. Can you explain me what is SES, SSID, WEP, WPA, etc which appears in the Linksys WRT54G setup program?
SecureEasySetup or SES is a technology developed by Broadcom to easily set up wireless LANs with Wi-Fi Protected Access. You use this feature if you don't want to take the headache of remembering the password to access the router/internet. You can directly access it. Otherwise if you have WEP, WPA security feature enabled then you have to use the password to get access.
SSID or Service set identifier is a friendly name that identifies a particular 802.11 wireless LAN. If it is enabled, your router can be seen to anyone in the range and can even get access using the password (if known). If you don't want this to happen simply disable it. Its not mandatory to have it enabled.
For others, I don't have much knowledge other than that they are used for secure your setup.
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a deprecated algorithm to secure your wireless networks. Wireless networks broadcast messages using radio and are thus more susceptible to eavesdropping than wired networks. WEP uses the stream cipher RC4 for confidentiality, and the CRC-32 checksum for integrity. Linksys includes two types of WEP encryption: 128-bit and 256-bit. A 128-bit WEP key is almost always entered by users as a string of 26 hexadecimal (base 16) characters (0-9 and A-F). Whereas a 256-bit WEP system needs 58 hexadecimal characters.
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a certification program created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to indicate compliance with the security protocol created by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks. This protocol was created in response to several serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). It is most secured among the two (WEP and WPA).
In my opinion, change the SSID from the default value to something unique. And also disable the Wireless SSID Broadcast option to avoid some hackers to get access to your network. In order to password protect your wireless network you can use WEP security; but remember you need to also use MAC address filtering (under Wireless MAC Filter subsection) to be on the safer side. Mention your computer's MAC address in this list.