NASA Overcomes 802.11b Wireless Security Flaws

4mn0t1337 writes: "Looks like the people at NASA came up with a "solution" to the weak secrutity in 802.11: Bypass it. From the article: "The team also assumed that all information on the network would be subject to eavesdropping, and that no identification information built into 802.11b could be trusted." So they chose to disable it, and set up an 'off-the-shelf PC running the OpenBSD operating system, an Apache web server, the Internet Software Consortium DHCP server, the IPF firewall software' and just depend on the security in protocols the services use. Moral of the story: Ignore the 802.11 security and just tunnel into our access points ..."

Comments

Tunneling is not the answer.

[davidu]

This solution, far from creative or unique, offers nothing in terms of aiding in the creation of secure PUBLIC networks.

For example, a college campus can't be expected to teach every student, including the non-geeks how to setup IPsec, port forwarding with SSH, and all other kinds of neat things.

Granted, Dan Kaminsky gave a talk at DefCon this year on how to seamlessly tunnel your way through 'hostile' networks it still isn't as simple as just renewing your IP and being online.

One possible solution to secure public nets is similar to the way we validate PGP keys. Face to face signing parties. If I run a public net I'd like to know who is using it. How about you drop by my cafe and just give me your MAC address and I'll add you to the firewall's rulesets. Automatically you now can find out who is in promiscuous mode, who is using all your bandwidth, etc, etc, etc.

There are many other solutions that aren't as much of a hack as IPSec, ssh tunneling, or any of these other high level obfuscators.

Thanks,
David U.