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Wireless Security By The Gallon
prostoalex writes "The next effort to improve wireless security might involve a trip to Home Depot. Force Field Wireless sells buckets of aluminum and copped-laced paint designed to prevent the 802.11 packets from escaping the building, Information Week reports. The article also talks about the Firce Field's pitch to the government in order to improve the homeland security, but the only governments that got interested in anti-Wi-Fi paint were from the Middle East. According to the products page, they also sell the brush sets." Easier than wallpaper, or moving into an old house.
Also, I hope they meant copper-laced paint, otherwise some police officers might want to speak with them. Hell, the bobbies may STILL want a word...
GTRacer
- It's lame joke day
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
So, it blocks an 802.11 signal. Wouldn't this mean that cordless phones would be blocked also. What about cell phones or old fashioned radios?
This might me more of a pain than a solution
Evolution or ID?
I'd like to see the MSDS(Material Safety Data Sheet) for those products. Adding heavy metals to non-commercial coatings can't be legal everywhere. I used to work in the retail coating industry (neighborhood paint store) and even just your standard bathroom paint is regulated heavily. So heavily it makes other EPA legislature look completely logical!
-Randy
What are the environmental effects of this type of paint? I would think that direct exposure to this paint (i.e. with no outer layer of nontoxic / latex) would be harmful. Boatowners use copper-based paints to keep barnacles from growing on the bottom of their hulls in saltwater. Designed to flake off over time, the paint is poisonous to sealife and highly toxic to humans. How safe can this stuff be? Do we really need more harmful metals dispersed in our environment?
My buddy's house, with stucco out and plaster in, provides a very strong 802.11b-arrier. An AP in his neighbor's house (visible in a window) is only intermittently reachable from his den, standing by his own window, about 22 feet line-of-sight from the neighbor's AP.
My neighborhood, a in a new development, is full of houses made from sticks, vinyl and wallboard. I can easily reach anywhere from 6 to 10 APs from just about anywhere in my house (and only 2 are mine.)
A few years ago I had a metallic paint pen. If you burnt the paper that had markings from this pen on it, the ink would glow brightly for a brief time before going out. It was a neat effect, glowing words.
Now I'm trying to re-create this effect for a film project, and I've had no luck. I've bought out the pen section at staples, tried various metallic paint pens, and none of them do this.
The idea is to have the credits written on a piece of paper, totally unlit, so all you see is darkness. As the flame creeps across the page, the letters will glow as the flame hits them. How could I do this?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
As this "security improvement" only affects computers in specially prepared rooms, WHY THE FUCK use wireless at all? A nice Cat5 is 10times faster than wifi, and even more tempest-proof than a metal painted room.
Using Cat5 over wireless is a massive security improvement in itself, also available from the Home Depot. Cable ends and crimpers are available too, and at a cost far less than the paint. I suspect the paint is for suckering in people who think 802.11 is the only thing there is. The rest of us who actually care and want to save some money will continue to run cables.
Every time I see something about "wireless security" I always wonder why people spend so damn much money (like the paint) and effort (new encryption schemes) on it when if you really cared about security you wouldn't be using it in the first place. "Wireless security" is good to stop someone from casually using your access point, but is no substitution for real security and encryption.
Even then, people pick stupid or easy to remember passwords for their base stations, or open the window of their wireless-defeating painted room, thereby making it all a moot point.
this is my sig
RF loves to leak. It is darn hard to retrofit a faraday cage into a normal looking room. The gap between the paint and the window film will leak. The door gaps will leak. The cable to your rooftop antenna will provide a path for leaks. The ac lines will provide a path for leaks. Don't forget about the floor.
Once you have the whole thing leak proof then as you guessed, no other wireless stuff (AM/FM/cellphone) will get through.
People pay big bucks to prevent RF leaks (ie. EMT compliance) because they are non-trivial to prevent. The pathetic thing about this is that it will give people a false sense of security. ie. It will make things worse because people won't do the other things that actually will work. My favorite solution: don't use wireless.
One of the early exploits for these techniques was to tap into the power lines supplying embassy code rooms and other sensitive areas. Teletypes and coding machines would generate electrical noise on the power line when they were being operated. With some clever analysis, it was often possible to determine what was being typed or printed on the machine. Other avenues of attack were the acoustic and RF emanations of the equipment.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is astatine. Why in a technological age when we have so much control over protocols that we degrade ourselves to securing rooms by physical means. It's as retarded as wearing a tinfoil hat.
Instead of blocking 802.11b/g frequencies with wall paint (along with cell-phones, radios and key-less car remotes) can't we use what's in place? You can design a router to restrict traffic based on hardware MAC address and design your DHCP servers to assign by MAC address. Create some scripts to synchronize your routing tables and DHCP configuration file with a single database, and you have a system to secure your wireless network.
You can also use the WEP encryption, and if you're still uneasy about that with all the recent white papers that mention how to break it, make all your intranet servers with private information only accessible to the wireless subnets using secure protocols (https, imaps, pop3s, etc.)
It's simpler, uses technology versus a metaphorical metal wall and cost a ton less.
It is a countermeasure to "Van Ek Phreaking", the blow-'em-away demonstration of which was a cart with a monitor and $100 worth of Radio-Shack parts that displayed the pictures that were on monitors in the curtained-off "non-disclosure-only" areas at a trade show, as it was wheeled by the booths.
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?