On The State of Wireless

There's a short piece on Mindjack about the state of wireless. Actually, the piece is a minireview of a piece that Nicholas Carroll produced at Hastings Research. Yes, it's a PDF, and yes, it costs money. Having read through it, it's also totally worth it, especially if you are an organization that does basically anything with wireless.

Comments

Re:Wireless is definately the way forward.

[Sloppy]

The real problem with wireless at the moment is security. WEP notwithstanding, it is still far to easy to take an 802.11b equipped laptop outside a large corporation, and to gain acess to its network with little more effort than clicking a mouse.

But this really just makes a problem that already existed, more obvious. If switching to wireless looks insecure, then you're probably already insecure.

That's why I think wireless will increase security: it'll get people to realize that they have to patch up their holes. Before wireless, they ignored the problem. I know of plenty of customer sites where you can log in to certain servers with full read/write permissions to everything, without even knowing a password. And anyone wearing anything that looks like a uniform and holding a piece of paper and looking busy, could effortlessly infiltrate their office and hook a laptop onto their ethernet (then log in, sniff, or whatever). Maybe with wireless, that kind of vulnerability will finally end.