U.S. Government Certified Wireless Security Products?

superid asks: "Our facility is just beginning to install small wireless 802.11b networks to support our office developers and staff. I think most people end up happy with wireless and enjoy the freedom. Our little branch office has about 100 people and our whole facility has close to 3000 people, so it's reasonable to expect our wireless needs to grow. However, I have just received an email, sent to all network administrators of our facility, directing us to shut down all wireless devices until they are certified by our Information Security department. Of course I'm not surprised by this. I'm aware of the problems with WEP and tools like airsnort. I know there are numerous security products and projects, but can any of them trace a lineage back to FIPS? Wouldn't it be a major victory to see an OSS product listed as validated by NIST?"

"Here are the certification requirements:

Encryption must be implemented end-to-end over an assured channel and shall meet the FIPS 140-1 or 140-2, Overall Level 2 (Triple-DES or AES) standard, at a minimum.

I know there are uncertified software solutions, but for ease of integration, our office has chosen AirFortress for a hardware solution. This will run us about $2,500 for our small office and is quite reasonable. However, it would be nice if there was an Open Source solution as well. The difference is that any OSS solution must be 'certified'."

Comments

Re:Why government certified?

[CodeMonky]

Because it's standard.
Because it's perceived as good.
Because if you want to get a government contract you better meat government standards.
Because the government is supposed to have what is best for the people in mind.
Because private corporations have what is best for them in mind and really want you to pay for their product and not their competitors.

IPSec

[Junta]

Wireless security in hardware is laughable. Some cisco products are resistant to the attacks airsnort makes and some strategies can be employed to make WEP more secure, but the fundamental design is too flawed to trust. Feel free to turn on WEP but never ever expect it to buy you much of anything.

The best strategy for both data security and access control is to use IPSEC, FreeS/WAN for linux and built in IPSec for Win2k and newer. If you have to use a dedicated WAP appliance, plug it directly into a gateway interface and have the wireless network on its own subnet, probably using a privately addressable subnet, since server applications on Wireless would be stupid most of the time. That gateway only would have udp port 500 and protocol 50, maybe 51 open, and the rest of the traffic coming in plain from the WEP get's dropped immediately. Now you are both forcing users to use secure transport level methods *and* preventing unauthorized use by those who do not have keys on the gateway. I'm not sure what certification it meets, but it is a proven, trusted technology as opposed to the "Wiretap Equivalent Protocol". Of course if the devices are very mobile and likely to be accessible from a public place or stolen, then you need to also have people use application level security to make sure the data is kept secret. At the endstations as well as while in transit.

Open source software can't meet this standard...

[splorf]

and neither can closed-source software. Why?

Because FIPS 140-1 and 140-2 are standards for hardware cryptography. They are in fact pretty simple and a device with a small embedded processor running open source software can fulfill its requirements easily, by making the device meet certain criteria about tamper resistance and so forth. However, it's the whole device that gets certified, not simply the software inside it.

Note that certification costs quite a lot, like $50K or so. And of course you can't let users tamper with the firmware (i.e. by changing it) and have the device stay certified. It might be ok for the user to take the device apart and change the firmware resulting in an uncertified device, but if certification wasn't needed the user wouldn't have needed to buy the device to begin with.

I haven't seen anyone actually answer you, so here

[Mtgman]

It's way overkill for your small business, and I doubt you could afford it, but Harris has recently started taking orders for it's new 802.11b wireless network cards and access points They're Type 1 encryption, as opposed to FIPS category devices which are Type 3. FIPS level security is for sensitive, but unclassified information, meaning it would be bad, but not devestating if this info was cracked. Type 1 devices are used to protect Classified information, seriously bad juju could happen if the wrong people get this info.

Not only that, they have a price-point about half that of previous Type 1 encryption devices, about 2700 per node as opposed to about 5k per node.

Hope this helps, they have a nice datasheet and brief on the site.

Steven