You have set up a new wireless network for one of your prestigious clients. The director wants to ensure that only certain designated wireless laptops can connect to the new network to prevent…

MAC address control works by configuring the wireless access point or router with a whitelist of approved device MAC addresses - unique hardware identifiers burned into each network interface. The access point rejects association requests from any device whose MAC address is not on the list. This directly fulfills the requirement of allowing only designated laptops to connect to the network.

IPv4 addresses are dynamically assigned via DHCP and can be trivially changed by a user, making them unreliable and non-standard as an access control mechanism for wireless network admission.

WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is a deprecated wireless encryption protocol that protects data in transit but does not restrict which devices are permitted to attempt a connection to the network.

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) provides encryption and authentication for wireless traffic using a shared key or enterprise credentials but does not limit connectivity to a specific set of designated devices.