Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Camouflage?
Anonymous Coward writes "Black Alchemy's Fake AP generates thousands of counterfeit 802.11b access points. Hide in plain sight amongst Fake AP's cacophony of beacon frames. As part of a honeypot or as an instrument of your site security plan, Fake AP confuses Wardrivers, NetStumblers, Script Kiddies, and other undesirables. Fake AP is a proof of concept released under the GPL."
Fake breasts?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So I get a list of hundreds of access points. My trusty computer can be programmed to check them all one by one. Only the legit one will respond. I realize this is a bit slower, but I think the number of fake APs needs to be huge to hurt the war drivers.
In fact, I think that the problem with this solution is the amount of effort expended in defense is equal to the amount of effort for the war driver. You've got to have a PC pumping out fake APs constantly. Both radio modems are putting out the same bandwidth. This isn't a good equation for most of us.
Good encryption, on the other hand, takes only a few cycles to do but a gazillion cycles to undo. That's a great ratio of defense to offense.
Plus, don't the fake APs still end up jamming the channel. If you're faking an AP, someone else can't use the channel on that micro second. Given that wardrivers come only occasionally, but the jamming goes on constantly, I think that the legitmate users will pay a big price in network access for something that would only slow war drivers down a bit.
But I may be wrong.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Let's hope that this concept is never applied to physical security. Imagine working in an office/cubicle with 32 keyboards and 64 mice, rj45 and rj11 jacks everwhere, throw in some extra pc cases to fill every inch under your desk -- with only one of each that actually works
First, uncloaking networks. Then, invisible cloaks. Now, cloaking networks.
Next thing you know, we'll see a post about the invention of visible cloaks.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
This won't do anything to hide an active network, people will just look at the data traffic instead of the beacons.
As a wardriver, I think that this would definatly confuse and annoy anyone driving around.
However I've noticed that companies with wireless AP's tend to be in clusters in close vicinity to each other. I'm just wondering what the effects on the persons neighboor would be. I could just see someone running this and just confusing the hell out of his neighboors. It would be even worse if the fake broadcasts were on different channels, then there would be real chaos with legit users.
Fun to play with, but not practical for production since a determined attacker would wade through the data to get your real SSID
Just my $0.02
Where are we going, and why are we in this hand cart?
Am I the only one who saw this and thought of Starbucks?
:-)
no sig.
That's probably its achilles heal. If you measure which AP point has the most traffic, you've blown past any illusion of security this gives you.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's not security through obscurity, it's creating a forest around your tree. While I may be able to secure the machines on my network, use a VPN for all transactions over the wireless network, there's no real way to secure my access point. WEP is a joke, plain and simple. If someone gets on my wireless network unauthorized by me, I'm liable for whatever shit they might pull through my internet connection, so I don't see the supposed stupidity in making it alot harder for someone to find the real access point. I have my doubts that this software is as effective at what it's trying to do as it's author(s) claim, but even so, it narrows the potential abusers of my network down to the determined, patient, and lucky. No security is perfect. You just have to run faster than the slowest guy to avoid getting eaten by the lion, you know?
And a better analogy would be trying to avoid venereal disease by dumping condoms all over the place so it's a veritable certainty that you'll be within reach of one wherever you happen to find yourself doing the nasty.
A better