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Microsoft Virtually Duplicates Your Wireless Card
akhomerun writes "Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its experimental new VirtualWiFi Software. The free software enables Windows users to use a single wireless card to connect to multiple wireless networks simultaneously. The current build is a very primitive release, with no support for WEP or WPA encryption."
You need two Wifi cards to do some man in the middle attacks..
;)
Will this make it easier
Does this mean we can connect to an AP and then connect using ad-hoc using the same card to another computer? This would result in a relay
This just doesn't look like typical Microsoft, and IMO that's a good thing...
Source code, a simple web site, and command line operation.....what more could I ask for?
Thanks, Microsoft (geez I still feel wierd saying that....)
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I currently use dual nics to connect to my home and office network as I presume a lot of other people do, this should help reduce costs in similar scenarios. I didnt install it cause of the WEP/WPA limitations, did anyone else try it? If so does this allow bridging connections?
The blurb makes it sound like this is essentially a way to quickly switch the hardware from one AP to another, buffering packets until the hardware is connected to the proper AP. I'm curious how efficient this process is, as there's bound to be some switching latency. For low-bandwidth non-latency-bound tasks, I assume it's virtually seamless, but I wonder how non-latency-bound you'd need a task to be before it starts becoming problematic.
Wouldn't a proper software-defined radio be the real solution, allowing connections to 2 APs simultaneously with only one antenna? Obviously Microsoft's working with what they've got, and it's certainly an interesting capability, but I'd rather see real effort on SDRs, particularly the regulatory issues therewith.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
p0wn3d by two k1dd13z at the same time!
Microsoft releasing tech previews with source code ? I mean, what has the world come to ?. Oh, sure it is under Shared Source license - but it raises serious questions about the way MS is dealing with the latest challenge from F/OSS. After all students are the major inflow of talent into F/OSS (starting from Linus Torvalds ...).
The only thing that scares me is that their website has an image that is 960x720 px resized using img tag height and widths - Which looks like it was done in powerpoint using 3DText. I wanted to pull the code and read it to see if it was some kind of trojan or something. All in all, it looks too unprofessional (website mainly) - at least compared to all the open source project sites I've run into.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
In related news, another Microsoft department is releasing a new DRM scheme that will prevent "unauthorized duplication of your wireless card, virtual or otherwise."
Innovation. From the beast..... I need to sit down :-)
This is Shared Source NOT free software.
May I use your sig please?
... found using Google, at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/ranveer/multinet/ software.htm
And the author's page, which follows quite naturally:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/ranveer/ ...which, if you look at it, will explain the origins of this "Microsoft" project :) His papers on "MultiNet" date back to June 2003.
Gan Family Homepage
Microsoft released something with sources...
Quick! Someone brutally abuse their trust by ripping off the design and idea. Release a fully (and better) working Linux VirtualWiFi driver by tomorrow!
Hack evil minions! Hack hack hack!!!
The comments on the website indicate that the code buffers traffic meant for another AP between switching networks. This of course is hindered by the time it takes to complete the 802.11 authentication and association exchange as indicated with the suggested timer values for the supported wireless cards.
Intel Centrino cards are well-known in the industry as being particularly aggressive at associating and authentication to an access point after being deauthenticated, thereby shortening the time needed to switch between different networks. It's unfortunately Centrino cards aren't on the supported list yet, they would make for an interesting evaluation target to use this kind of technology in a sort of mesh wireless network.
Thanks, Microsoft (geez I still feel wierd saying that....)
Why should you feel weird saying that? I say it all the time. Oh wait, I normally say it sarcastically.
How much use this will really get. Connecting two wireless networks may be 'cool,' but how many offices maintain two separate wireless networks? I am sure there are some, as some of you will surly point out. If you want an internal wireless network, that should already exist since you wireless network should be behind your router/firewall anyways.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
While I'm a linux fan, if the summary is accurate, you're comment is off-base.
Layer 3 aliasing is not the same thing as multiple physical/radio connections. If anything it's more like channel bonding than aliasing.
That said, I don't know how useful this would be. I mean for a windows box it is. I could see the usefulness of this for a repeater but in such cases I'd just use linux and save the license fees.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Except that the above creates an alias, using the same connection.
The above allows you to associate to more than one wireless network using just one wireless card. Try plugging your regular nic into two switches at once and see how it goes...
Yep, at the tender age of five, Linus Torvalds conceived a method by which to clone network interfaces in the, as of yet, nonexistent Linux kernel.
Its very strange that Microsoft would be doing this, totally out of chatacter for them which makes me think that using multiple wireless networks is something that going to play an integral part of a future product.
Watch this space.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
At the moment, wireless AP's don't have to worry about frequent switching.
But if everyone and their brother started using these things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with a huge amount of hookup requests.
Now admittedly I don't know much about the guts of an AP, and how limited their processing ability is (apart from bandwidth)... but this certainly isn't what they were designed for. I would be surprised if they could handle this kind of abuse from multiple users.
Or am I completely off base?
If I connect them to each other, not only can I send files, email, pictures, etc to my computer from my computer, but with this technology I can do it wirelessly.
I'm really only interested if I can bond the two connections together and stea^H^H^H^H borrow twice as much bandwidth.
come on, this software isn't even anywhere near actual release. Give the guy a break. It doesn't come with a gui and the ability to check mail yet either.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I'm wondering if you could effectively double your speed by connecting to more than one access point. Wireless access is everywhere today, you could set up your laptop and instantly get at least 2 access point connections almost anywhere, like San Francisco for example.
Great idea! That would allow you to switch access points while you're on the move; similar to ordinary cellular networks. The buffering would indeed create some latency, but if both connections are already established it should hardly be noticeble.
Yes, but if I remember correctly it is pretty complicated to actually handle parallel radio signals using 802.11b. More likely, it would come down to a form of time sharing with consequently higher latency. Guess they just choose the way of least resistance given that Wifi cards are a relatively cheap component in perspective of longhorn/vista's hardware requirements.
Anyway, being able to switch AP with low latency would considerably close the gap between wireless voip and gsm phones.
I'm not sure the poster meant this to be funny.
Servers use multiple NICs to increase bandwidth. Why shouldn't a wireless user do the same?
There's already implemented Linux IEEE 802.11 stack supporting multiple BSSID ( Virtual AP ) and multiple client mode ( Virtual STA ) connections on the same radio interface simultaneously. And it supports WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption on every virtual interface. And it's linux thing!!
This is yesterday's press release I found http://i-newswire.com/pr48263.html
and link to their site http://www.wilibox.com/index.php?id=wili
In cell networks, each handset retains a low-level session to at a minimum two cell towers. When the signal from one tower gets too low, it pops over to the other.
Good things about this technology:
- I see this technology being used to reduce handoff delays between networks, or even between access points. The neat thing is that it does it on the client side, not the infrastructure side.
- The thing that this is going to be best at is mitigating the problems streaming video or audio across a network, where delays of 50ms can kill your stream.
- Solutions like MobileIP where each AP becomes aware of a care-of address that the client was previously associated with help handoff, but require new firmware on the access point or router. This puts that intelligence on the client side. Increasing the queue depths on both sides couldn't hurt, however.
- Because 90-95% of the handoff time between access points is a rescan for new channels, keeping a session going between two different networks and being aware of the channels around you will actually reduce congestion and handoff time because there is no rescan and its consequent flood of PROBE frames which clog the channel with BROADCAST responses!
- Because the clients will retain knowledge of who's around them, the access point's BROADCAST frames can come less often than the present ~100ms, increasing the available bandwidth.
Not-so-good things about this tech:
- Not a lot.
- Subnet resolution might be a problem, no, wait, it wouldn't because they maintain a separate IP address for each virtual adapter. However, if those IP addresses are on the same subnet and someone pings the broadcast address of the subnet, the clients on the other network might respond as well... but I guess that would only happen if the virtual adapters were bridged.
That's usually the problem with things like MobileIP - some routers don't get the message and update their routing tables so packets get duplicated all over the place.
- Available IP address space problems. If everyone is opening two sessions...
- Doesn't support WEP, but who cares. Everything important should be encrypted at the application level anyway. Thing that concerns me is the lack of 802.1x support.
All in all, not a bad idea. I hope to see more out of these guys. I'm taking this down to the lab to run tcpdump and airopeek on it.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
I do. You're welcome to associate to it, hell, you can even sniff my traffic if you want. Anything of any real value is already going over SSH or SSL.
WEP/WPA is for tinfoil-hat wearers. If you wanted security, you would not be using wireless.