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Stronger Encryption for Wi-Fi
sp00 writes "The first products certified to support Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, the latest wireless security technology, were announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance on Wednesday. The Wi-Fi Alliance says WPA2 is a big improvement on earlier wireless security standards, such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which hackers have found easy to circumvent. It includes Advanced Encryption Standard, which supports 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit keys."
The real question is will the manufacturers come out with new drivers/firmware to take advantage of this new technology?
As long as these acess points are shipped with encryption turned *OFF* by default this is like pissing in the wind. It could be 1 billion bit one time pads and woulnd't make any difference. In my neighboorhood there are 10 unencrypted networks....all on the default channels. Out of the box straight onto the network is how they are set up. Joe Sixpack doesn't have time to deal with encryption.
*don't worry much residential war drivers..there will still be free lunch for a long time to come...
>Unless companys start requiring it
That's a bit out there. Do you really want the ISP doing what they think is best for you (or them)? "Oh, so you're running a webserver." Block port 80. "Oh, so you aren't using Microsoft's Firewall?" It gets installed by a tech and they charge you 50 bucks for the trouble, even though you have a hardware firewall, etc. Trust me, you don't want to be punished by rules set for the lowest common denominator.
The problem here is the problem we see everywhere when it comes to computers: usability. WEP is counter-intuitive to implement. WPA is a step in the right direction with a single password (as people understand the concept of passwords). The new MS wireless manager in SP2 goes a lot way to simplifying wifi also.
Make no mistake about it, there are lot of people who tried to get WEP to work only to have it fail. I know I've had bizarre issues with WEP that could only be fixed with a hard reset on the device and falling back to default settings, a firmware downgrade, upgrading firmware on the card, generating new keys every so often because the thing just didn't like the old ones, playing around with advanced wireless settings, etc. I don't think that level of troubleshooting should be expected from a typical end user.
> on most residental points will take several weeks
Try months (and thats on old equipment with no firmware upgrade to filter out weak frames). Try not getting spotted sitting there with your laptop and running airsnort all day.
Do these WEP fatalists also refuse to lock their cars/house doors because anyone with some skill and one easily gotten tool can open their doors? Do these people also make their own padlocks in their basement because every manufacturer has a master key? Do these people also use blank passwords because cracking NTLM or most passwd files is very doable, etc.
Yesss.. that sounds like a great idea.
However, if you don't mind, I think I'll skip all the "take a look at my recipies" formalities and go straight to
- sniffing your email passwords,
- reading your email,
- sending email under your account from your IP,
- using your wireless access point to spam,
- surf some underage porn using your IP,
- seed my "next big worm" from your connection,
- browse/sample your internal network from the IP your WAP so conveniently gave me,
- and finish up by making various explicit threats against the president on the newsgroups while simultaneously using your cable connection to make VoIP calls to the NSA and reading them some of your previously mentioned fine recipes.
I almost forgot to say thank you for the free access point. Where are my manners...
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...