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Paint Provides Network Protection
thefickler writes "Forget WEP and WPA; I'm switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently announced paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks. The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities."
I hope no one ever wants to use a cell phone in your house.
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
Someone is going to sue, either because they painted all the inside walls like a dumbass and wireless won't go room to room, or else they'll get cancer, and swear the paint magnified and reflected all the microwaves into their body.
Sure it is safe untill somebody needs to open a window or door? Or is this to keep the wifi signal in prison safe? Another fine example of security by obscurity: it never works and is only a good idea as a complement to a setup that is secure without it.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
it could also protect against cell phone brain cancer
The idea of containing electrostatic and electromagnetic fields is to create a Faraday cage. If you are within an unbroken metal shell, most alternating fields and all electrostatic fields can't reach you. Un-alternating magnetic fields can still pass through. The problem is that any break in the metal shell is a possible window for the fields. That means the shielding on the walls has to be completely bonded to the shielding on the ceiling and floor and windows. The doors use something akin to weather stripping.
The other problem is that wires pass through the faraday shield in most cases and those provide a path through it. The bottom line is that if you are relying on a coat of paint to protect you, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
The concept of this product is neat. With careful design you should be able to prevent much of the signal from an access point going beyond a certain area, thus allowing you to put more APs on the same channel closer together within the building than before. The number of users that can sensibly use one AP will be the same but the number of users per m^2 that can use APs(plural) will be much higher. Bandwidth still won't get close to Ethernet but that shouldn't be the issue as the few people who really need bandwidth in a corporate environment should still be wired.
As before, proper authentication and confidentiality is the route to a secure wireless network,
What are you talking about? Windows COMES with Paint, with Linux, you're stuck with this thing called GIMP.
Wait, what are we talking about? I'm confused now.
(Seriously, when I first read the article headline, I thought they did mean MS Paint and couldn't figure out why that would help with network protection. Then I read the summary and figured it out.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
OK, I just ran pbrush.exe but I don't see any commands for establishing my network protection. It only gives me some tools for what seems to be a diagraming program.
Maybe I should read the article or the summary for more detail.
Nah...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Already protects my network.
I wonder if this paint would block an EMP? I didn't see anything about it in TFA, but that would be a neat side effect.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
You will have to de-fenestrate your home.
Most Slashdotters already live in homes without Windows.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
I work in a pretty specialized architecture firm, and some of our clients are slightly paranoid to say the least (Ting foil hats? More like Tin Foil Ceremonial Headpieces...) and we are working on a project that has a room that is set up to ward off an EMP during the coming apocalypse. I'm not kidding. The 'Safe Room' in this building is totally shielded, you can't get any type of electronic signal in or out. Coatings like the paint mentioned in the article are becoming more and more and common,and I think we're going to see a lot more multi-use coatings like this in the future. At the moment, they are extremely expensive, but as the price drops, this will become a pretty standards feature in a lot of new constructions where buildings are put up in close proximity to each other and interference tends to be a big problem. Conversely, you can always just get a few rolls of Reynolds Wrap and poster your walls with that.
Et In Arcadia Ego
I agree with this article completely. I have been using MS products for years and I found that MS Paint is the one program that has never had any exploits. If I could somehow run everything through Paint, I'm sure my network would be much more secure.
> Remember, radio signal strength is logarithmic.
No it isn't. It is inversely proportional to distance squared.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Paint chips? You mean wall candy!
When 14 or so people were to be moved to adjacent building, it was my job (ITmanager) to make sure they had all there network services.
So I asked for wires to every room and one wireless spot in the middle, the DECT repeater in the hallway not far off was enough to get good reception in every room.
A week before they change places I checkt the new cables, new fiber to the spot, the wireless, it all works.
The day they move, I get scrambled calls about the wireless not working properly and the phones even worse.
What happened? The last day the creative head decided everybody needed one or more magneticly painted walls so they can hang work/memos/etc without having leaving little holes in the wall everytime.
So I needed a new DECTrepeater (and new cables from the PABX, which would have cost a little extra when the fiber was laid in place; but now costs as much for the work) and even now 3 rooms down the phone service isn't great, wireless in those rooms sucks.
http://www.rustoleum.com/product.asp?frm_product_i d=644&SBL=1
painted my daughters room with it OVER 3 YEARS AGO and it does the exact same thing. we lost cellphone coverage in that room (aluminum screens and storm windows complete the circuit)
The overpriced paint mentioned in that article and I have see elsewhere for the tinfoil-hat crowd is no better than the el-cheapo rustoleium primer applied as 3 coats so that fridge magnets happily adhere to the wall.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is lead the only metal that
1) Can be made into a paint
2) Conducts radio waves (this is a Faraday Cage for radio waves)?
The answer is no. Most metals conduct radio waves to some degree, just like most can conduct all EM radiation. There are quite a number to choose from that are harmless to humans. Lead is the big choice because its so dense, but we're not talking about nuclear radiation here (and more importantly, we're not talking about nuclear particles, which are stopped by other matter getting in the way, not just by conductive materials). We're not blocking the EM equivalent of a truck - just a series of tubes.
I can see a way around the window/door thing as well.
Put enough conductive material into the Windows and you'll get the same effect. In addition, there are some shapes you can make the entryways (again using principals of a Faraday cage) that will cause the radio waves to tend not to reflect out.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I thought about this as well; however, if you think about it - this paint could really help in certain areas.
Let's say you have a need for wireless in a data center. Most data centers I've been to have 0 windows - windows just aren't energy efficient enough to have in a data center; in addition, if someone wanted in from the outside, they'd just smash a window. Those servers would start to look like gold to a thief.....
Anyways, any secured area that you might want a specific network on wireless could have 0 (or faraday caged) windows within the room. I'm sure if it's a wireless security issue, this paint can be a huge help. It probably wouldn't help much on your house, for example.
Karnal
Huh. I guess they're good for something after all.
Anyone who needs their network to be more than casually "safe" needs to run cat5. Running some cable is too much of a problem, but repainting your house and installing some specialty doors and windows is somehow easier?
We are all just people.
Actually I can think of a use for itmyself, too. The way we are testing wireless forensics or mobile viruses is to set up and actual real life environment. No emulation, but real hardware itself. At the moment this calls for renting of an underground military machine shed/hangar which is naturally signal shielded by helluva lot of rock/soil on it. It would be lot more efficient just to have a test lab which is painted with this. :P
And ofcourse building a faraday cage would be just as efficient, but it's always cool to rent underground military premises
Bot Assisted Blogging
A bit off topic, but a friend just set up his new MRI scanner and of course the room it is in is well shielded. You need to keep its magnetic waves in the room and you don't want anything interfering with the machine. However, so they can do functional MRI, they need to project video into the machine (e.g., you can watch a video while getting scanned).
Since the video projector can't be in the room... they created a wave guide which is a metal tube of a size (width and length) that doesn't allow anything harmful in or out of the room (electro-magnetically speaking) but is effectively a literal hole in the wall that they can project through. In some studies about taste they can also run long tubes filled with "flavors" so that they can allow a person in the scanner to "taste" while being scanned.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Governments have a great habit of wasting money by trying to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'. Of course, you can never achieve perfection, but their endless quest does have the effect of each extra step costing enormous amounts of extra money with minimal incremental benefit.
In this case: WPA (and many other layers of encryption) = free. Painting a building with special paint = £$massive.
What's scary is that someone from a government department will mandate this kind of tosh - and suddenly every government building (including leisure centres) will have to have it.
Of course, the irony is that - once they get paint like this, people will feel overly secure - reduce the more sensible types of encryption - and then leave the loading bay doors open, right next to a wireless repeater, pouring forth their unencrypted secrets.
Saw article headline.
Assumed MS Paint.
Was already forming snarky comment about dipping a RJ-45 connector in primer to give network security.
Now I feel more and less stupid at the same time.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Hey, maybe they should paint theaters with this stuff...
Fuck that, I'm all for painting cars belonging to people caught using cellphones while driving with this crap. I mean, windows and everything. Maybe we could arrange a dunking vat, you know, for quick, easy and thorough radio-wave proofing.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
This 'solution' creates another problem - it prevents communication from happening.
It is one thing when a person in a cinema uses their phone - lack of education. And it is another thing when someone receives an SMS, being notified by vibra, without disturbing anyone. What if the SMS bears news about an emergency, or something that is of a critical importance?
Do you think it is 'cool' when you have a problem and your doctor is notified via SMS while they're watching a movie in a cinema or having dinner in a restaurant that uses this uber-paint?
We need to solve the original problem, not substitute it with a different one. My guess is that the answer lies within ourselves - self improvement, educating our children, etc. Paint will not change the human nature, only humans will.
The saddest poem
I'm sure schools would pick this up very quickly if it blocked cell phone signal. I can almost factually say that my school would.
If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.
I lived in an apartment at one point which didn't allow my DirecTV dish, but one of my windows had a clear view of the southern sky. OK, I decided, I'll just set the dish here on the floor and point it out the window! Well, that didn't work. At first it was the metal screen blocking the signal, but the apartment complex manager was nice enough to have it replaced with a non-conductive fiberglass screen when I asked. But it still didn't work. With the window open so the dish was only looking through the screen, everything was fine. Close the window, though, and my signal dropped to zero. Signals at those frequencies are known to pass through ordinary glass, so I'm guessing that the windows were coated with some type of glazing, possibly metal-based, that blocked the signal. Heat was included in the rent at this place, so the apartment complex had a direct interest in energy efficiency.
My solution was to build a double-paned window out of two sheets of clear acrylic separated with spacers and insulated all the way around with foam tape. I cut it to fit the open window perfectly and unless you looked very carefully, you'd never notice that the "real" window was wide open and the "fake" window was filling the space. It was well-insulated enough even in the winter that the heat loss was no problem. But the important thing was that the satellite signals passed through the acrylic with no problem, and I was probably the only person in the whole complex to have satellite TV. Plus, I earned geek points for having a working satellite dish on my living room floor. Yes, I was single at the time; why do you ask? Heh...
Almost factually? Is that like being sort of pregnant?
--Obyron
Waaaait a minute here.
Did you say six mils ? I think people aren't understanding how thick that is. That is one whoppingly heavy coat of paint.
That's not really "paint," that's more like a sprayed-on or rolled-on coating. Just to compare, that's like seven layers of household (0.02mm) aluminum foil.
Now, maybe it's still easier to put up than gluing sheets of a solid material in place, but the quantity of this stuff that's going to be required to coat a large space is going to be enormous. And unless it has some sort of quick-drying solvent base, it must have to be sprayed in multiple coats, particularly onto ceilings, just to keep from dripping.
I could see a lot of problems in using this stuff in anything but secure areas; it's not just a drop-in replacement for current, conventional house or office wall paint.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem isn't necessarily trying to dot every i and cross every t, or even government in particular. How hard is it to picture a good number of PHBs in the private sector reading this article and thinking "paint will make our network secure!"? The difference is that rather than your tax dollars being wasted, investment/operations dollars will be. Cost subsidized by the consumer in less competetive or more collusive markets.
To be pithy, the ultimate problem is "zeal without knowledge" -- or, to be a bit more verbose, quick institutionalization of specific rules and practices for their own sake, rather than the development of an institution with intelligence and introspection built-in and distributed throughout.
Tweet, tweet.
You know, just because you don't understand why the army needs this, doesn't meam they're automatically complete idiots.
Here's a thought for you: any good defense is built in layers. So if one layer fails, the others are there to prevent a complete catastrophe. This doesn't mean they won't enable encryption, maybe even an extra layer of encryption on top of WPA, it means that they'll _also_ have a physical EM shielding layer to pick the slack if someone made a mistake.
Additionally, the army has a long history of using and dealing with counter-measures. You don't see people trying to actively jam your home network, but in case of a war, that's exactly what the army might have to deal with. Whether actual pure jamming, or just an EMP from a nuke frying all your electronics, if the shit hits the fan big time. So when that happens, you'd rather most of it was shortcircuited by the building being a big Faraday cage.
Additionally, the army has to deal with EM radiation out of the building in more ways than some wardriver surfing for porn on your home network. It can be someone intentionally placing a transmitter somewhere, to some spy leaking the encryption keys, to being basically tagged for an EM seeking missile. While a Faraday cage won't make any of those 100% impossible, it gives you one extra chance against it. E.g., if someone left the door open near a repeater, you can notice you suddenly detect EM radiation around a building that was supposed to have none. E.g., sure, someone could climb on the roof and place their emitter for the missile there, but there's a chance someone will see them, whereas a modified laptop/clock/whatever in a drawer might not even get noticed until it's set to activate at midnight in anticipation for an enemy strike. Etc.
Additionally, the army is a bigger target than your home network. A wardriver will just go for whatever unsecured network is in the neighbourhood, and not even bother to crack your encryption. You're not worth it. You're one of millions of networks, each perfectly equivalent to any other, for his purposes. Even with the old WEP, chances are noone stood around long enough to gather packets and crack your keys, because, again, it wasn't worth the effort. A spy isn't as easily deterred. He won't go for Aunt Emma's home network instead. And he can devote disproportionate computing power and manpower to cracking the codes of a potential enemy superpower.
Of course, you can stick your head in the sand, put a big "WAP can't ever be cracked" poster and feel secure. What if you're wrong? Even for WEP it took two years for the vulnerability to be published. Plus, for the standard WW2 example, the Germans didn't think Enigma had been cracked either. (Nor did the civillians in most allied countries, for that matter. It was top secret.) What if some bright chinese mathematician comes up with some brilliant new way to decrypt it? Would you rather bet on that never happening, _or_ have an extra layer of defense just in case? Because from where I stand, given high enough stakes, the latter looks like the much smarter choice.
Basically, get your head out of the ass, and out of the "I'm teh genius, anyone doing things otherwise than me is automatically an idiot" mentality. Most often that should just be your hint that you don't actually understand what's happening there, and you're operating on just wild assumptions and pseudo-data pulled out of the ass to support that "I'm teh genius" preconception. And, as they say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.