Wi-Fi's biggest fan

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Dennis Eaton, chairman of the Wi-Fi Alliance, once dreamed of being a veterinarian. But his dream withered during a few days of college fieldwork with a vet.

"I decided I needed a nice, clean desk job," says Eaton, who turned his undergraduate attention from animals to the arcane art of radio frequency engineering. Radio frequency must be his true calling after all - nearly 18 years later, he's still fiddling around with those radio waves.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1984, Eaton began working on radio frequency projects - mostly for classified government projects - at Harris Semiconductor. Most recently, he's worked on 802.11b radio chipsets at fabless semiconductor maker Globespan Virata.

"RF engineering is pretty complex stuff," Eaton says. "The tools today let you get in the ballpark [of solving a problem]. But beyond that, it's a lot of intuition and experience."

That blend of science and art, of technology and intuition, has served this 41-year-old well during his tenure with the Wi-Fi Alliance. The Alliance, founded in 1999, exists to test and certify interoperability of IEEE 802.11-based wireless LAN (WLAN), or Wi-Fi, products. Today it comprises more than 205 member companies.

A hands-on visionary

Eaton's involvement with the Wi-Fi Alliance started in May 2000, but it had nothing to do with either engineering or management. It was clerical: helping his boss, Alliance Co-Founder Jim Zyren, wade through the slew of Alliance invoices piling up on his desk. Both men at the time worked for Intersil, in the fabless semiconductor maker's group designing 802.11b radio chipsets. (Globespan Virata has since acquired that Intersil unit.) After sorting the invoices, Eaton offered to relieve Zyren of managing the Alliance's Web site.

When Zyren gave up his Alliance board seat in early 2001, Eaton seemed a logical choice to finish out his term. Eaton became the board's vice chair and technology committee chair in June 2001. Two months later, leading cryptographic experts threw the Wi-Fi industry into a tizzy when they published a paper detailing the weaknesses in the 802.11 encryption scheme, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). By showing how WEP was weak, the paper clarified how it could be attacked, and a spate of attacks and attack tools began to appear. Eaton realized the Wi-Fi Alliance faced the possibility of certifying products that corporations would never buy.

"Prior to that, everything was at a theoretical level. That paper brought [the problems] to a practical level. It was pretty scary," he says.

Eaton, who took on the chair position in late 2001, played a critical role in finding a way to clean up the Wi-Fi security mess.

He built consensus among fellow board members, other Alliance members and engineers on the IEEE 802.11 committee regarding a technical solution to the problem - to take a subset of the WLAN security changes already being crafted in the IEEE 802.11i Task Group, and write and distribute software for these changes. This interim fix, dubbed Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), could be loaded into new and existing WLAN products, introducing features to rotate and change encryption keys frequently, and other changes to make WLANs more secure. A hands-on guy, Eaton "personally evaluated the security schemes in hand [for correcting the WEP weaknesses]," says Amer Hassan, a fellow board member.