No matter how strong your firewall is, and no matter how solid your kernel configuration is, if you send your mail password in the clear across the network, you have subverted all the security built into your system. Secure communication is the keystone in client-side security. For a full discussion of secure communication mechanisms, see Section 3.1.2.

With your FreeBSD and Linux wireless clients secured, you can compensate for a hostile and insecure network. By locking down your workstation, an attacker will likely get frustrated attempting to attack your machine and will move on to another host on the network. The next steps in secure wireless networking are to examine the security of the access point and the network gateway.