This Article was originally posted on July 17th, 2017, at my page on Quora.com:
Others have already talked about the technical pros and cons of each system, I thought I might chime in with a more philosophical answer in the hopes that it doesn’t trigger a “duh”. When you use Wifi, or any other wireless communication protocol for that matter, you are in principle broadcasting everything you use that connection for out to the world around you. In theory this is safe because you are encrypting those transmissions, but there is always the risk that a skilled attacker could break that encryption.
While there are no known attacks against a good WPA2 system you in principal can’t know for sure that the connection is secure. For this reason it’s always a good idea to use what’s known as defense in depth and encrypt your connections more than once in more than one way, I’d say the same about any system where there is a fundamental doubt about it’s security, or for any communication that is particularly important to remain secure.
In the case of a wired connection it’s important never to fully trust the physical medium in this case either, after all how do you know there is no third party snooping your traffic through a lan tap, no malware installed on any networking equipment between you and the end point, or any extra hops added along the way?
From a risk analysis standpoint, I think this is a issue of little concern, as long as you are using modern standards for wireless internet, in a home or SMB environment you should be fine, larger organizations with an interest in security may benefit from implementing 802.1x systems to give them the best network protection for both ethernet and wireless signals.
Edit: Since the original writing of this, there has been a major defect in the security of the WPA protocol (the "KRACK" Attack) while this goes to only reinforce my sentiments on the matter as expressed above it illustrates beautiful the importance of staying up to date on your security news, and installing updates as soon as they come out. In the case of Wifi, a good way to ensure that you are never unprotected, is to invest in systems that keep themselves up to date, a good example of this would be the access points offered by Cisco's Meraki devision
