Can someone explain basic wireless internet security to me?

[kandrathe]

Right now I have this D-Link wireless router. I have the wireless capability disabled because the two computers connected to it are side by side and are physically plugged into it. I know nothing of wireless security other than that I should be concerned about it if I have a wireless network, so I just took the easy way out and turned it off.

Now I'm in a situation where I have a third device I'd like to connect to my router, but it must be a wireless connection (I managed to get a Wii). Both my router and the Wii support WEP and WPA security (whatever they are), and I hear that I should turn both on. The problem is that I know jack crap about what any of this stuff means. I don't want to enable the wireless signal on my router without being pretty confident that I can secure it.

Can someone walk me through basic wireless internet security, including things like what WEP, WPA, and MAC filtering mean and how I can lock down my network? Please to be using simple terms that a wireless idiot can understand.

Most people secure their router to only accept connections from specified MAC addresses. That is the simplest, however if someone intrepid figures out one of your MAC addresses they can spoof one of your devices and connect. So, then you really need to have encryption and some secure authentication protocol. WPA allows WEP to be more secure, so you need to enable them both. WPA uses Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) which upgrades WEP to address security problems. Essentially, rather than using the same encryption key on every packet, TKIP creates a new key for every new packet thus foiling anyone who happens to snatch a packet and decrypt it hoping to then hack your network.

This seems to be a good article on it. PC Mag.