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."

Comments

overhead

[a3217055]

All these new ways of encrypting data over wireless is great. Security of data is a good service. But how much will it cost, do you need more expensive hardware to create such encryption, will there be a loss of performance and other related factors. These are important and must be tested before we start saying that wap2 is the world's greatest thing for wireless encryption.

AES protects entire frame

[jonabbey]

I believe the AES implementation they are using actually does encrypt the ethernet (MAC) address, unlike WEP. (See Tying It All Together in this article for corroboration of that.)

WPA2 with AES is the real deal.

So I have to upgrade...again?

[Powertrip]

So this means to take advantage of the latest security, I would again have to upgrade all my AP's and Clients... $ $ $ When will this whole industry be commoditized enough that we have 'soft' radios for wireless (Like AC97 Audio) that allow us more flexibility in upgrading older hardware to newer standards? Heck, with a true soft-wireless chipset we could use one RF device for WiFi and Bluetooth and whatever they dream up next...

Re:802.1x

[ImaLamer]

Why not solve the problem by putting another line of authentication in place?

My school *shudder* has access points in many of the labs but after a student said he was going to "hack" into it there was a simple warning:

1. We know the MAC address to every computer in the building...
2. We keep logs of MAC addresses that don't match our set (apparently he went around reprogramming the MAC addresses to a now defunkt card maker's line for easy log watching, except for one lab which was un-re-programmable)
3. Breaking the WEP key is a crime, during the investigation we will try to track your MAC to you (hope you didn't pay with a credit card - your breaking into "protected" systems, in fact a federal crime)
4. You can't get anywhere, you must authenticate through the NT (blah) server for network access
5. It's pointless

Really, it made sense. He simply stated that there was no point in getting a signal without access rights. The man's first job was to secure the wired network. Once the AP's were put in, it wasn't a problem.

Could you run wild on your companies network by just plugging into the next available switch?

If so, fix that problem first.