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Study: Wi-Fi users Still Don't Encrypt
Shackleford writes "SecurityFocus has an article saying that two days of electronic eavesdropping at the 802.11 Planet Expo in Boston last week sniffed out more evidence that most Wi-Fi users still aren't securing their networks. Security vendor AirDefense set up two of its commercial 'AirDefense Guard' sensors at opposite corners of the exhibit hall at the Boston World Trade Center, the site of the conference, and for two days analyzed the traffic flowing between conference-goers and 141 unencrypted access points set up by the conference for public use, and by vendors on the floor.
What they found was that users checking their e-mail through unencrypted POP connections vastly outnumbered those using a VPN or another encrypted tunnel. Only three percent of e-mail downloads were encrypted on the first day of the conference, 12 percent on the second day."
First post through my neighbor's compromised WAP gateway. Off to view some porn now. :-)
But with some patience and airsnort even "secured" (ie. encrypted) access points can be used without permission. And MAC address filtering is a joke since I can easily change the what MAC address my airport card uses under linux.
Maybe it's time for a new, and effective standard.
A similar survey would be to test how many POP3 servers out there support SSL. I suspect that it's on the low side of 3%. POP3 with SSL is a trivial, easy alteration that many POP3 clients support, instantly securing the network without layering on a secondary encryption layer (VPN/PPTP/IPSec) when all you want is to check you email, which is what probably 99% of the users do at trade shows like this.
9% of attendees learned something from the expo. :)
There is some good basic WLAN security info on AirDefense's knowledge center section of their website...
Something clever...
This only verifies the importance of application level encryption. Every socket communication should be encrypted so that security doesn't rely on the network connection itself.
Suprasphere encrypts all socket communication using a dynamically generated Diffie-Hellman key exchange. This is much better than SSL because it does not require using a CA so you can set it all up without any administrative overhead.
Furthermore, all authentication uses a zero-knowledge proof so that a password is never sent over the wire. Even though the traffic is all encrypted anyway, this adds another level of security so that a compromised passphrase at one sphere will not allow authentication at any other. You can store a profile at different places that can only give you access if you can prove beyond a statistically reasonable doubt that you are who you say you are.
With all the media hype about wireless, a growing number of people are simply buying an access point and a couple of NICs, flicking through the manual, and then running default configurations, because the average user probably isn't aware that what they are doing *is* insecure, and has never heard of WEP. No doubt this (and newer ideas such as 802.11x) will be in the 'advanced' section at the back of the manual with bluntly technical instructions filled with acronyms and concepts that a non-IT savvy person would simply skip over.
Once it 'works', the majority set-it-and-forget-it - no different to the populous of home users running xDSL without a firewall, or those who never patch their boxes. A quick drive round your local residential area with a copy of Kismet proves this point for anyone with any doubt =)
On the flipside of the coin, in the corporate world, sales reps, engineers, and other 'road warriors' should really be given this advice from their support teams, and have their machines configured appropriately in advance by someone knowledgeable - they really can't be held responsible for the lack of action by the correct department.
I live in a small iniversity town. Even the shortest bike ride with my Zaurus running kismet finds many access points in businesses and homes unencrypted (war biking?). I often run ethereal for the few minutes it takes me to get up and order coffee at one of the local cafes. It never fails to catch pop and imap passwords, mail, and instant messaging conversations. I always use ssh or VPN, but I don't feel superior. Most of my own non-work related mail is sent in plain text.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
AirDefense Software Screenshot
Something clever...
Next thing you know, people will be failing to apply patches.
The coolest voice ever.
Kinda like how's happening with illegal p2p usage? oh wait...
If people don't think wireless security is imporant and we make a law that forces them to implement it then respect of law will suffer. Just like how it's happening with p2p. And do you really want to waste police resources to triangulate source of wifi signal? And even if they do that they'll still have to get a warrant to make sure the signal comes from the place they think it's coming. Whoops, you can't get a warrant for a crime that only has fines as a punishment. Let's put those who run unsecure wifi to jail! What a great idea!
Only way to solve this problem is to make it illegal to sell wifi equipment without auto-enabled encryption. People don't care about the issue so any attempt to force them to care will be wasted. Attempts to force them to use will just be met with contempt.
Is it possible that most people don't give a shit about encrypting their e-mail because the contents of their e-mail are so inane and you can't trust the intervening steps?
I mean really - if I want secure transfer of information i'm not going to use e-mail. The effort wasted securing it is truly wasted effort, in my view, because of the lack of a trusted MTA. I don't trust my ISP. They can read this shit. So can every other transit point. Do you? Don't you feel somewhat foolish for admitting that?
I secure my IM. End-to-end encryption at least has a point there.
That being said, the article seems to lack point - expecting 'more people' to do something that is fundamentally pointless.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
A few years ago I was given a demo of TCP-dump by a resident BOFH. First step was to read all of the private communications between a certain user and other people in a chat room. The next was to take a look at some people's emails as they were relayed through the router (including their POP3 passwords). Since that day I have not sent any password unencrypted...
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If you use WEP, but everyone knows the key (e.g., at a trade show so you need to make the key public to let people on the WiFi network), I assume that's the same as unencrypted. However, why couldn't there be a RSA or symmetric encryption for 802.11[x]? So you make the public key for the access point, available, anyone with that can connect, but your PC/WiFi card encrypts every packet going out the door, so the traffic going from the client to the access point is now secure. Similarly, the client gives the access point its public key, so all the traffic coming back to the client is also secure. This probably requires a lot more overhead in the access point and client, but I don't think that it would be unreasonably so.
the problem lies more in the way the access points work at the moment rather than the end users not using POP without security. The best you can do with access points today is to set up single key (like WEP) that is shared among multiple users. The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
The WiFi links were unencrypted, having been provided by vendors at the show that set up open access points.
The question was whether the users implemented their own end-to-end encryption with their email servers, etc. via SSL, SSH, IPsec, or whatever. That's pretty easy to recognize.
Encryption might take a while to set up, but it's a very good thing. Not only for your own data.
I'll explain. Many of us run web servers and let friends have sites or mail accounts on them. Now, I'm pretty sure that in most places reading your user's mail is illegal. Suppose you're logged in on your server trying to solve some problem by looking at what's going on with a sniffer like tcpdump or ethereal. Accidentally you see a friend's private email scroll by.
Now, of course, this wasn't intentional. But what if you make a slip? The email could have been about some event you didn't know about. Then, a week later you forget where you got that information from, you ask that friend about whether his grandma got better. The friend then asks "How do you know that? You weren't reading my mail, were you?". Depending on how this person feels about you, you might get into some trouble.
This is why on my server I provide IMAP accounts only though SSL. I never look in user directories unless needed. And I tell everybody who gets an account that if they want to be completely sure their data stays confidential that they should use PGP and that I can explain how to use it.
It's not that hard to set up, anyway. Set up a mail server with SSL and you'll be able to check your mail safely from anywhere. Install SSH for administration. Install Apache SSL even if you don't need it much, to give the users who want it the ability to log in with an encrypted connection. Use an instant messenger like Jabber with a SSL connection too.
Don't worry about self-signed certificates. A certificate from Verisign provides a rather small increase of security which people tend to ignore anyway. If you just want to avoid your traffic from being sniffed, it should be enough.
Excepting web browsing, most of my data is encrypted. I even found that I can browse kuro5hin.org throught https. It's a good thing too, when I login my password won't be sent in clear text.
So perhaps this *may* mean that only 3-12% of the people feel that what is contained in their email is important enough to encrypt. Why does this article assume that VPNs are necessary in every case?
You know, it is sometimes good to be "paranoid", but often it is just that, paranoia. Do I care if someone sniffs my unencrypted "penis enlargement NOW!" emails? Security is not always the primary design factor, and sometimes is disregarded altogether in the face of getting things done.
I can't help when I think of "security" of the push/pull battle that the U.S. Army had with the Manhattan Project personal. The Army, of course, say bogeymen under every rock at Los Alamos, but the scientists soon discovered that to aid in the project, many "security" concerns had to be circumvented...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
This all adds up to make it really easy to sniff usernames and passwords just by sitting in a campus hangout area with a packet sniffer.
I have whined at my University for IMAPS support and was told that, while they were interested, they couldn't roll it out because their servers couldn't handle the extra CPU load from all that encryption/decryption. I suspect the answer is the same in other places.
Doesn't really work in this case. It's the network at these shows that is untrustworthy not just the airwaves. The only thing the WEP (if it works right) is good for is keeping people you don't want off your network; it doesn't actually add any significant security for the user from the network. So as a user in 99% of all cases you want end-end security, not point-point; because at each of these points the traffic is unencrypted and can then be sniffed.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"but not as trivial as sniffing on an unswitched network.
Furthermore... if I'm the sysadmin, and I catch you running a sniffer, well, I probably won't care.
If I catch you doing arp poisoning in order to intercept traffic on a switched lan, I'm going to yank your connection / get you fired / expelled / press charges for hacking.
One involves listening. The other involves messing with stuff and deliberately breaking how things work.
Its plain to see! Take my hometown.. right next to a beautifull mountain range. Just get on top of one of the mountains and use a dish tolook down.. 72% of the 180 networks that showed up within 5-6 minutes were all unencrypted!
802.11b is slow enough already.
Try streaming a DivX over wireless with encryption, it doesn't work. It barely works when you turn it off.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
the point of WEP is misunderstood, as well. Yes, it was poorly implemented.. but it was not supposed to be the data security layer anyway... just "wired equivalent"
That means.. it was supposed to be roughly as hard to get access to the actual network packets as it is when someone has a wired lan.
The wire is not secure, as you know. Wires can be tapped numerous ways, invasively, or passively. Yes, the logic is kind of flawed, the situation is different.. but it just makes it harder to sniff, not impossible.
IT wasn't supposed to be a replacement for using secure protocols.
Most people don't care all that much about their home wireless networks (or their personal email) being encrypted, because there's no major threat. Sure, corporations need to protect their ever so secret information and precious bandwidth, but if someone near my house wants to go ahead and use my wireless connection, as long as it's not crippling my connection speed, so be it. Not a big loss for me. If someone is going to go through the effort to snoop my network, you're not going to find anything worth stealing that you couldn't get easier from Kazaa. If someone's going to be reading my personal email, well, they're going to be plenty bored. It's just not worth hacking into my computer, there's nothing of non-personal value on it.
Security isn't a major issue for home users. That's why they don't treat it as such. Sorry guys.
--
RumorsDaily
This shows the power of defaults. Anyone who has done any wardriving will notice that a lot of networks have the SSID "linksys" or "default".
Take it out of the box, plug it in, and it works. That's the beauty of wifi.
I'm sure we'll see a move my manufacturers towards secure-by-default (as secure as possible, that is) as we've seen Microsoft trying to do with IIS in Win2003.
That said, there is certainly a place for unencrypted open networks.
I was surprised that I was able to pick these up from the street. Also surprising was the names of some of the networks, I mean kittyNET, c'mon!
Also, it's amazing how many people have linksys.
USE WEP, PEOPLE! Or at least configure your router to only accept your computers' MAC address! jeez.
There's lots of reasons to close your network to the outside. The main one being that you don't want to give people access to your LAN. Most people don't password their computers from other machines on the LAN, since they figure it's secure, but it's not. Also, I tried the default linksys password ("admin") on a couple of the networks, and would have been able to change router settings. Imagine setting up a dreamcast w/ wifi outisde of someone's house on their external power outlets and serving warez off their connection. sheesh.
these routers should come with little pamphlets about wireless security.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
WEP is a horrible thing. I use it msyelf, but that's mainly to keep my non-techie neighbors from turning on their laptops one day, have windows xp realize there's a wireless connection in their range, and start using my bandwidth. I have no delusions that my data is secure since anyone could, with a little patience, use airsnort to find out what my key is.
The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.
As another poster pointed out in this very article, it would be much better to have some sort of PGP encryption in the access point, where you send your public key to it, and it encrypts the data back. Problem with doing anything based on mac addresses themselves, is that you can change your mac address in both windows and linux
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... did they mentioned that some access points go down to modem speed if WEP is on? The on board CPUs simply cant keep up doing WEP/64.
I think you should forget about WEP and use IPSeC and VPNs instead
Ask that question again, "why would anyone target me specifically?" It sounds like you use Windows. It also sounds like you don't know what a script kiddie is. It really sounds like you haven't got a clue.
There is a low likelihood that someone will engage in a targetted attack against your machine. However, with batch attacks being run by adolescents, targetting entire IP address ranges, you b0x could be 0wnz0r3d by such an attack.
Your...question, "My point is, sure, if someone went to the effort, I guess they could hack my computer, but why would anyone target me specifically?" is the same view most people have. The problem is that your are clueless, and don't believe that it takes no effort at all to 0wn j00r b0x.
This isn't about wep....
Its about people using an insecure method to access their mail.
The wireless access points were ment to be open to the public.
Jeroen
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I don't see this as too surprising..most people think that by installing ZoneAlarm and buying a Linksys router, they're immune to any form of attack or subversion. This extends to both wireless and traditional setups.
As I see it, there are two very fundamental reasons for this: lack of awareness and lack of comprehension. The average day-to-day user doesn't even know what a firewall is..what are the chances that they'll have a clue about encryption? I mean, c'mon..we're living in a world of users who largely think that SSL means that they're safe as can be, that security is something you purchase, and the only difference between wireless and a traditional connection is a lack of cables.
Awhile back, I was going on a pretty big BSD advocacy kick..y'know what finally made me give it up and shut my mouth? One girl had a bunch of questions, so I tried to answer them as best I can. I also wanted to make sure that I made clear the differences between Windows and BSD, as most MS users aren't accustomed to the file system, configuration, etc. So, naturally, I bring up firewalls, and how you essentially write your own rules for it by hand (in this particular instance, I was covering ipfw).
Rather than take my advice, she immediately became defensive, ranting off about how she's not some AOL kid, and how she already has ZoneAlarm, so she won't need to worry about a firewall on BSD. I could go on and on with stories like this.
I realize that this isn't just about wireless, but I don't think the issue is that limited in scope. Computer security is taboo to a lot of people, and unfortunately, it's a problem that needs to be addressed...or taken advantage of by those with a greater sense of what the fuck is up.
WEP is useless security-wise. It's much better to leave your AP open, but require VPN authentication and encryption to get onto the actual network.
Someone could cause chaos by strolling through a downtown with an infected system.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The WEP stuff is still useful as "windowshade privacy." It's not useful so much as a security measure but to keep out accidental glances at your naughty bits, and it does at least put observers on notice that they're not supposed to be there. That's good enough to keep out most people, who are basiclly honest. To work on the remainder, who can either be an overly curious set of those bascicaly honest folks or even plain old bad guys, you can use a VPN, SSL/TLS and so on. WEll actualy in many cases you can't do that, because the networks or servers you want to use haven't been set up to offer those facilities. I know it's fun to blame those silly ignorant end usrs for this, but the responsibility really does fall with admins on this one, to at least make encryption available, and perhaps even mandatory.
Here's a simple guide to setting up WEP on your WAP:
1. Visit this page -- it will generate 13 random hexadecimal digits that you will use for a 128-bit key.
2. Copy the resulting digits into a text editor and strip out all of the whitespace between the characters.
3. Log into your WAP router and go to the Wireless configuration settings. Select the "128-bit encryption" option, and enter the generated key into the WEP key field.
4. The last step is OS-dependent... In OS X, you would log on to the WAP as usual, except that now it will ask for a password. Select the dropdown box labeled "password" and change it to "128-bit Hex", then enter in the generated key. I believe OS 9 users will need to enter a "$" before their hex key for it to work properly. It won't let you paste the key in, so you will need to type it carefully. I don't run my Linux box via WAP, so I'm not exactly sure how Linux users would do this -- feel free to reply to this post and add other OS instructions...
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The average non-technical user is happy enough just getting things working.
Home users want to take their notebooks anywhere in the house and be able to surf. Business travel through airports (interoperability) may not even be their priority.
Why should they be concerned about mac addresses or hex keys? Firmware upgrades to make things more compatible?
Lets make it easy for them. Vendors should sell wireless home networking kits that have all the encryption turned on in advance by default, with drivers that assume this also by prompting for the prepackaged keys at install time.
Joe user could buy a box containing an access point with two pcmcia wireless nics. By default those two nics will be the only onces that can access the access point. The shiny box that says "easy install" will be what clinches the purchase.
Of course an advanced user could still change the defaults to suit their needs.. but that requires effort.
Joe User will always assume the defaults are good enough for him, and they should be.
It doesn't bother me if my wireless traffic is sniffed...anything important I'm doing over a wireless connection (Secure HTTP for online purchases, SSH for shell access, etc.) is already encrypted at a higher level than WEP works at. There's no need to encrypt the entire network, if you don't care about someone reading your e-mail.
Even if you do care, IPSec is probably a better choice than WEP is.
A good friend of mine has an interesting hobby - he's looking for APs and checks whether there's a mostly open file server around and then proceeds to copy the contents to the laptop, burn a CD or two and drop them into the phyisical mailbox of that company or office.
In at least two cases, he got the contents of a lawyer office. Some people were supposedly not amused, but at least they accepted his help in securing their networks.
why is it that i am not surprised at this stat? the problem with the current state of wi-fi is that it is generally insecure by default. if you want to increase security you have to fudge around with cryptic configuration settings, and if you don't know what you're doing you can make your network even less secure or fubar the whole thing. the mass market consumer -- and this would be the target audience if wi-fi were to really take off -- should not be expected to know what vpn stands for or what a tunnel is besides the big holes that trains and vehicles go through.
in an ideal world secure protocols would be built in and invisible to the user. out of the box all security measures would be enabled by default, so if you want to turn off encryption you'd have to turn it off manually. the dream of ubiquitous computing would be a nightmare without ubiquitous security.
My father and I have gone "war-flying" at 500 feet above residential areas in his Cessna 120 (2 seater airplane) and have literaly picked up HUNDREDS of open and unencrypted AP's within minutes. From what I understand, it is completely legal to listen in and monitor any radio frequency, so long as it is not encrypted and you do not publish any of the content.
For fun in college, my buddies and I used to terrorize our fellow dorm mates by listening in on their cordless telephone conversations using a police scanner. We would call them back and mention parts of their conversation in amusing ways. We were always kind of hoping that we would overhear a girl say "I'm so horny right now" and then go knocking on her door at just the right moment. We were pretty pathetic...
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Agreed. Anytime you are checking your email on the road it should be secure. ssh tunneling is one method, secure webmail is another.
What amazes me is that so few firms understand that their "road warriors" are their weakest link in their security. You frequently see firms where engineers are told they cannot work from home, even with ssh tunneling, "for security reasons", but the companies' road warriors are zipping in and out of airports with detailed business plans and spreadsheets sitting on their unsecured laptops.
Hint to sysadmins, if you're letting them fetch their mail over a clear connection, you'd probably let someone else pretending to be them send email through the company mail server.