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House Paint Foils Wardrivers
Ant writes "Security-minded U.S. decorators' supply outfit, Force Field Wireless,
claims to have developed a do-it-yourself solution to the international menace of
marauding geek wardrivers: DefendAir paint 'laced with copper and aluminum fibers that form an electromagnetic shield, blocking most radio waves and protecting wireless networks.' According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's report,
one coat of the water-based paint 'shields Wi-Fi, WiMax and Bluetooth networks operating at frequencies from 100 megahertz to 2.4 gigahertz", while two or three applications are 'good for networks operating at up to five gigahertz.' However, there are downsides to this." Since it's a water-based paint, exterior use is only recommended for people who want more copper and aluminum in the soil surrounding their house.
Would you have to climb up the chimney to call your friends?
This story was already covered here
A new, better solution has been developed. They call it ENCRYPTION!!! Oh how wonderful. Now we don't even need to repaint our houses.
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Just because it's water base doesn't mean it will wash away with water. Latex paint is water based... Once the water evaporates the emulsion hardens.
It is a DUPE from LESS then TWO weeks ago.
/. was down for a few hours earlier today?
Honestly, do the "Editors" not even read the site?
I know it's probably always been like this around here...but still.
On another note, did anybody else notice that
.sig
they make tin foil hats for houses now...
Paint your house with this stuff? Psshh, I take care of the SOURCE of the problem, I shoot war drivers with my paintball gun.
My dad was a war photographer in Korea. He had some level of clearance and once was working at a base on the coast of Florida photographing experimental weapons. He was walking around the facility and started talking to a major. The major was complaining about the fishing boats close off the coast, saying that they were known communist spies doing surveillance of the bases secret operations. The nature of the operations made them need to be outside and there was not much they could do about keeping the spies from photographing their operations from the fishing boats.
My dad suggested that they build a pipeline around the base and pump extremely hot water through it. The steam would keep the spies from getting clear photographs of the bases operations.
Ever been to the airport and notice that distortion coming off the top of the jets in the summer? The waviness is caused by the steam and heat coming from the plane. This is the basis for the pipeline.
The major had the pipeline constructed and shortly after the fishing boats stopped snooping around the base. Think of it as a photographic firewall...
Its not that OT when you think about it.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
This is great, unless you YOURSELF want to connect from the outside, like from your backyard.
(sung to the tune of the popular song "Gold Gold Gold Gold")
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I'm not really familiar with wireless technology, but I DO know that a conductive shield around something will protect the thing inside it from extraneous electrical fields (as long as their frequency isn't super-high), but that any radiation produced by the thing inside the conductive shield will get out just fine. Because wireless things are on carriers of "only" several GHz, the increased size of the shield (as opposed to the normal antenna or whatever) shouldn't make any difference to phasings.
I guess that most people have their houses land-lined (or satellited, or whatever), and then use wireless networks to distribute bandwidth _within_ the house, right? Because putting a shield around such a house would only serve to keep outside signals from getting in, not inside signals from getting out. Of course, if protocols usually work with a "give-and-take" system, then this would cut off part of that, and people wouldn't be able to connect to your wireless system, but they _would_ be able to eavesdrop.
This seems also to be an ideal product to increase the chances of your house being struck by lightning, too.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
How will you cover areas such as windows? If this doesn't cover the windows, war drivers are not foiled.
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Now do I change the defaults on this linksys, Or just repaint the house. Hmmmmm cost of copper in wiring up the house compared to cost of wireless networking and plastering the entire house in copper, its a tough call. Manual pls.
En..cryp..tion..? What is this newfangled devilry?!
!@
...are you firing laced paint????
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I love this stuff! I use it all the time to paint my tin-foil hats to look more like hair. You know, like in Calvin and Hobbes.
This flies in the face of science.
Anyone else smell a law suit? Oh, you can't smell? Or breathe? Must be the laced with copper and aluminum fibers paint you've just smothered the babies crib and the inside of your house with. Does anyone else think this crap just wreaks of a law suit? Or are we all disoriented and stricken with alzheimers due to the aluminum and copper laced paint chips we just unknowningly ate with our cherrios?
It would be good Tempest hardening for a SOHO or a SME type business where you didn't want the signals getting out of the building. And I can see some locations going for this as part of their Tempest shielding regimen.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Not only will this block Wi-Fi, but it will also block cell phone communications as well. Of course, some may appreciate the paint's second use as a cell phone blocker!
Take a look inside your walls. I'll bet you've got thermal insulation in there that is in those rolls sandwiched between aluminum foil. That will put a pretty good dent in the UHF and up, but the RF will leak out elsewhere.
But atleast I don't have to worry about my 802.11b/g network being hijacked.
I live in a house with lead paint.
no, just kidding.
Grump.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Notably, the corners of your house will act like corner cubes maximally reflecting the energy back to the emitter itself. If the emitter happens to be your laptop then you are going to get the majority of the radiation passing through you on each round trip bounce.
as it happens, the wavelength is near the wavelength of your microwave. The microwave is tuned to optimally excite the rotational frequency of aqueaous water. The 2.4 Ghz is slightly off the optimum but You are inhogenous enough that you probably absorb quite well in this region. The rest of the dry materials in the room wont be doing much absorbing. Thus you will become the primary fate of all the radiated energy.
so you lose on two accounts: 1) high field strengths 2) all the energy resonates around till if finds your testicles.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Your father's scalding water scared all the fish away, you insensitive clod!
The more stupid the mistake the less people want to admit it - it took many years before aluminium was ruled out as a contaminant, but since the aluminium link had been in the newspapers for years we are stuck with another urban myth (just like the wartime carrot nightsight myth - you can't magically boost you night vision with carrots (Mawson didn't get better vision fron a near lethal dose of vitamin A), but it was the excuse to avoid admitting that radar existed in WWII).
Would that happen to be the same encryption that cable, satellite and content provider pirates brag about cracking, no matter how much it changes? Or did you mean some other "never to be broken" encryption?*
Lets see:
So, what do we have? Weak security schemes that involve 'security through obscurity'. Kind of like setting up a wireless network and hoping that nobody finds it. :)
Now, lets look at wireless encryption:
Yes, some encryption sucks. We know that. Some 'encryption' turns out to be slightly more than access control -- encryption on certain Microsoft formats used to be able to be broken by just erasing the password field in the document! Some encryption is a more obfucated version of ROTn.
That doesn't make all encryption schemes worthless.
Some encryption schemes have been peer-reviewed for many, many years without flaws being found. Short of a "Sneakers"-style mathmatical breakthrough, its doubtful that some of these schemes will ever be broken. Others may be vulnerable to the sheer brute force that a quantum computer may do. A good OTP systems using a good scheme to collect its random numbers will never be breakable without a pad.
Currently, there are encryption schemes which are for all practical purposes, unbreakable. Want to snoop in on a SSH session? You better be willing to compromise a computer on one end, or torture someone for information. Want to feed information from an IPSEC-protected wireless network? Break into one of the machines or break out the bamboo splints.
*Physics verses encryption? My votes for physics.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about? Other than physically torturing someone for information, or building a better brute-force machine, physics doesn't break encryption. Mathmatics does.
My dad insulated the walls of his garage with Styrofoam with a foil backing. His 900mhz phone doesn't work in the garage now.
He tried running a wire from inside the garage to outside of the garage thinking it may carry the signal, but that didn't work very well.
He tried moving the base station to the upstairs of the house but the sheet metal roof blocked it from that angle too.
MOST new homes are now constructed (around here) with that foil backed styrofoam. Seeing the trouble it made with a 900mhz phone, I would think it cause just as much trouble for other signals. It's solid so I would think no wavelength should be able to penetrate it except by sheer brute force, IE a "hot" signal.
Even if you thought it was worth it to prevent your neighbors' wifi from interfering with yours, it's still stupid. You kill your cell phone reception, probably reduce your TV reception, and it's impractical to paint your ceilings, floors, windows, doors and fireplace. It's expensive to apply, and can't be removed easily, so when you go to sell nobody wants the property. For all the costs and effort, you can hire someone to wire ports into every room in your house. Or put repeaters in every room. Painting every surface of your home to get good wifi is asinine.
If I did work somewhere that was sensitive to electronic espionage, I'd have rooms built to spec with actual faraday cages and other countermeasures, not modified as an afterthought.
This time a bit more litterally. No one wants to paint over their transparent light-holes!
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
my house in tin foil.
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Not sure how effective this is at the frequencies we are talking about, but this one uses a safe nickel pigment, and is entirely odourless and solvent free: ECOS EMR radiation shielding paint.
Do you have any clue what you are talking about? Other than physically torturing someone for information, or building a better brute-force machine, physics doesn't break encryption. Mathmatics does.
I don't think he means that physics beats encryption, but that he would rather choose a solution to cracking networks involving physics, like the paint, than using encryption.
Earlier tin was used in antifouling paints to prevent marine growth in boat bottoms. Later it was replaced with copper but nowadays in Scandinavia it is also prohibited (from 2004), at least for leasure boaters because of environmental reasons. The paints will prevent marine growth also near boats and can be a severe hazard by marinas. Using brush few times a season serves the same thing.
Many water-based latex paints are sold as environmentaly friendly. However, they may have larger emissions on hazardious substances than oil- or solvent-based paints.
I mean, that can't be more expensive than painting your whole house, can it?
Might have some chance in a room with no windows and a steel door, but painting a house or office with this would have minimal impact on war drivers, if any at all.
I have a wireless network (running very cheap, low power equipment) inside an all-steel warehouse building with steel screens and grates on the windows. I can access my wireless network reliably in a cafe down the block (brick building across the alley, roughly 1/2 block from the AP). It's also easily accessible from any of the nearby streets and parking lots. If all that steel isn't going to stop a WiFi signal- I really doubt paint with metal flakes in it will.
Really- a house or office building would have to be built from the ground up to shield RF if that's what someone really wants. Seems pointless and really "tin-foil hat" to me. I'm sure the company will get lots of paranoid people or people with disposable income to buy their paint though...
Is aluminum and copper in the soil actually a bad thing? I thought those metals just passed right through us. After all, we do use aluminum foil on our food and we move drinking water through copper pipes. Aluminum is fairly reactive and easily forms aluminum oxide, which, if I remember correctly, is a noteworthy portion of ordinary clay. Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points.
I know they're looking to improve convenience, but I think someone should say one more time for the late arrivals: If you're really worried about network security, don't use wireless.
To hell with the fancy paints. Here's my secret: 1) Install security camera overlooking the street 2) Wait for nerds to pull up when they discover my network 3) Grab my baseball bat 4) Run outside and pound them to a pulp Works every time.