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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'."
Why do we jump to have the government certify our electronic devices, standards, and protocols? Why can't we merely rely on the private sector to develop sound products? Why don't we fight for LESS government and LESS government intervention? How much control over your daily lives do you want the government to have?
Many Slashdot readers are "liberal" or "left-leaning" and are opposed to the War on Drugs and drug laws in general. If you don't like the government telling you what you can and cannot put in your body, why are you so eager to have the government tell you what it thinks the best and worst products are? Let the private sector handle this.
Sensitive data that needs protection should be encrypted at the app level anyway.
I'm *far* more interested in robust access-control rather than someone peeping in to my packets...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
What makes anyone think that the US government could do any better securing wireless devices than the millions of geeks currently working on the subject?
Anythin gyou put over the airwaves is gonna get hacked sooner or later, because you've just eliminated the ONE thing that makes hacking the hardest: ACCESS.
Getting access to the data is always the most difficult step, hence Social Engineering, breaking and entering, etc. Putting all your stuff on the air so anybody can drive be in a car, or set up a nice antenna across the street now lets them suck down all your data and take all the time they want to crack it.
So if you want really good security on those airwaves, well you're going to need something that wasn't put together by a bunch of geeks working on their lunchbreaks. (At least right now, in the future as security because more developed this might change). You're going to need something that a reputable company puts out and will back up with patches and changes and won't put in backdoors because they're too worried about lawsuits. Someone with an excellent track record, and who will personally answer your security questions.
You just don't get those kinds of things or assurances with today's level of Open Source Developers. Besides, if you're not willing to fork out some major cash to secure your data in a highly insecure environment, then maybe you shouldn't go there!
[[[rimshot]]]
Get your Unix fortune now!
Dealing with the current state of wireless security isn't worth it.
Move all of your access points to a network that is outside the firewall. Treat the wireless network as if it is completely untrusted. Enable DHCP on the untrusted network, but do not route the network to anywhere except to the VPN concentrator.
Place a VPN Concentrator on the wireless network and give VPN clients to all of your wireless users. No VPN = NO ACCESS. Problem solved.
All of your company's encryption requirements can be handled by the VPN concentrator, which I'm sure you can get certification for.
You want it in your lifetime? Who's going to certify it? Better yet, who's going to pay to have it certified? Unless you want to explain, in court, to arrogant, hostile morons, why an OSS product meets the standards, you have to have somebody else state that it does. That costs money. One way or another, you're going to have to pay.
Why in court? Because at some point, somebody can claim that you failed to exercise "due diligence" for something -- somebody else's proprietary secrets, personal information, or your own insider information. That's why people pay for certification -- they can point to somebody else, whom they paid to tell them it was "good."
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Basically what happens is, you go talk to one of a number of organizations that NIST has approved to do the validation. Then you pay them a lot of money to go over your code. This generally takes one person full time on your side to answer their question and deal with the paperwork. What they're looking for is how you handle key material, and how you implement and use various cryptographic algorithms. For example, at Netscape we had to make some modifications to our random number generator to match FIPS 186.
Even after your software is validated, you still don't know that it's "secure". All you know is that it conforms to FIPS 140-1. While this can give you some comfort as to the soundness of the design of the software, it doesn't insulate you from bugs that can create vulnerabilities.
Finally, you also have to worry about keeping your validation updated every time you change the code. You need to show that any of the changes you make don't affect the validation in order to preserve it.
If you want a secure wireless network why not just impliment every security procedure you can think of and stack them? I'm not too familiar with wireless, I've never actually delt with it personally, but I've talked to people who have, and they said that they use 512 bit encryption combined with a DMZ, and that locks everything down pretty well. Then if you're REALLY REALLY REALLY paranoid and you want to contain the wireless users to a certain building, you can always line the walls with a wire mesh screen to block the signal. Yes, easier said than done, I know, but if you're psychoticly paranoid it might be worth it
That was presented at the 2001 IEEE Security and Privacy conference. The idea is that if two characters are enough milliseconds apart, they likely come from separate rows on the keyboard.
The researchers estimated about a 50x work factor reduction for cracking the password.
Then came the audience question which was a trademark of the conference, "Were you aware that $1 reported that already in $2 at $3?"
Also, we have hopes that it's a lot easier to make governments pick a standard and stick to it, collectively (as in ISO), although it can be hard to get them to agree, say, ANSI vs CSA standards and so on...
/. don't know what WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) is, and that's OSHA (Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act).
By the way, T-Ranger, my Canadian confrere, most of the Yanks on
Interrobang, tech writer in OSH&E
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Last meeting I went to at NIST they had wireless set up for us but had no security at all on it :)
Finkployd
Yeah, sure. Get a government certification. That will keep you safe.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Check out Harris at
www.govcomm.harris.com/secure-comm
They make a PCMCIA card that is due to be tested for NSA Type 1 encryption soon. I saw it in action during source selection review, and it works pretty sweet.
I believe this will meet any encryption standards they could throw at you; it's good enough for the NSA!
Enjoy.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
We are using the the Fortress Technologies AirFortress Layer2 Encryption switch to secure wireless networks. It is FIPS 140-1 certified for government use with 3DES, AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256. We have tested it with PDAs using MIPS and StrongArm processors running Windows CE 3.0 and with wireless clients running Windows 95 (Rev. B), Win98, WinNT 4.0, and Win2K. The WinXP client is almost out of testing for release. The OS for the Fortress Security switch is Linux (they block shell access - it is a security switch), but there is no Linux client yet. If you would like for there to be a Linux client you'll have to contact the company (they say they could develop it but there hasnt been much customer demand). The email is tech@fortresstech.com. We are a wireless integrator for the government and we sell the fortress security for $1895 on our GSA schedule. I can be contacted at rhay@suprtek.com. Also, we have tested this security solution with 802.11b access points (Cisco, Orinoco, Symbol, Netgear, Linksys, etc...). Also the Agere, Avaya, and Intel APs but they are just the aforementioned vendors OEMd. The Airfortresses can be used to encrypt and decrypt either end of a bridged link or they can be used to protect a wired network from the wireless one, only allowing access to validated clients (it uses diffie helmann key exchange and encrypts every frame to and from the wireless client). I have used Airsnort, kismet, and Ethereal to observe the AirFortress encrypted packets and all you get is frames that have valid ethernet headers, a 0x8895 ethertype the fortress registered type), and encrypted bits. No IP headers. Anyway, it's government certified, it creates a very effective wireless DMZ that protects the wired network from the wireless one, using it on the client end is a no brainer (it literally is transparent to the end user so it can survive a PBCK [Problem between chair and keyboard]). We do wireless video for a Metropolitan Police Department and have a lot of wireless experience. And the AirFortress has an elegant solution for niche applications.
Richard Hay | Systems Engineer | rhay@tamos.net
This does not address Denial of Service attacks caused by birds attempting to collect bits of the string for nesting material; a preferable solution to both issues would be to run the string inside a conduit with a diameter greater than the maximum amplitude of the carrier waves. Care should be taken to plan ahead and use larger conduits than are currently needed, in order to accomodate future increases in wave size.
Otherwise, everyone will be clamoring for "fatter pipes".
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
Open source vs. closed source should not make any differece. The key is the cost, everytime to modify it, you have to recertify it! Granted the recertification will cost less than the first time, but it is best to isolate the security sections as much as possible.
See my other post for comments about what certificaiton actually buys you.
There's really no need for this sort of thing - 3DES or AES are strong enough to keep the NSA and KGB out if you use good keys and don't mishandle them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lets say that your wireless product uses WEP. There is nothing that would keep you from getting a FIPS 140 certification for that product, even though WEP is a really broken algorithm. All the FIPS 140 cert does is assure people that you really did implement WEP.
Aside from assurance that the product works as designed, the best use of FIPS is for hardware security designs. Unlike logical security, it is fairly easy to specify the requirements and goals you want your hardware security systems to meet. The labs that perform certification also have a lot of experience in ensuring products meet their design goals. So FIPS 140 (IMHO) is an excellent standard for hardware.
Another problem with any certification, including FIPS 140, is the need to recertify anytime you change the certified sections. The way most people do this, is to compartmentalize the security sections (which hopefully rarely change). Never worked for my last job, where we had to change these types of sections several times a year.
So, to directly answer your question, I think asking for a FIP 140 certified product will not buy you much security for your problem. The idea is to solve the security problems as they are installed in your system. The Common Criteria standards will probably work much better for this (but here your organization is responsible for getting the certification, although it helps if your vendors can supply components that are already certified).
Who's asking you to get it certified? Do they know what that means, or whether there are actually products with certifications that make sense for your environment? Do you work for some kind of government organization that has formal requirements for it (and if so can you negotiate a waiver in return for using appropriate protections)? Or do you work for private industry that can make intelligent decisions on your own (in which case get your management to blow away your Info Security folks and tell them to go provide useful protection rather than getting in the way of real work)? Or do you work for some corporation that does military contracting and therefore has bureaucratic rules to follow (that's probably the hardest version to fix, and may depend on whether you can argue that your site is separate.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
I will claim quite a bit of ignorance on this issue. I have just recently set up my own 802.11b system at home. Because it's inside my firewall (a Linux box that acts as router/web cache/firewall), I didn't want it to be open to the world (and I hope it isn't). The rest of my machines are Windows (it's my job, sorry), and they're all pretty exposed, hence the Linux box in the middle. I got a Linksys AP and card.
I had a lot of problems getting WEP to work properly (though I think I could get it working now), so I simply did a MAC address restriction on the AP and, if I understand it properly, nobody should be able to use my AP but a machine with my laptop's MAC address (which is supposedly unique). That doesn't mean the traffic can't be monitored. For this, I don't know, but I'm not real concerned about that.
Wouldn't a combination of WEP and MAC address restrictions be enough for most places, though?
Cisco's VPN client offers a built-in host based firewall, if you configure the VPN not to run in split-tunnel mode.
Once the VPN is established, all traffic is routed through the VPN and all inbound traffic is thrown away.
This creates a minor inconvience to users who want to print to local devices on the 802.11 lan, but you just move those inside the corporate network.
Apparently you have to wear camouflage to use these cards. I suppose that provides added security.