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A Look at the State of Wireless Security
An anonymous reader brings us a whitepaper from Codenomicon which discusses the state and future of wireless security. They examine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and also take a preliminary look at WiMAX. The results are almost universally dismal; vulnerabilities were found in 90% of the tested devices[PDF]. The paper also looks at methods for vendors to preemptively block some types of threats. Quoting:
"Despite boasts of hardened security measures, security researchers and black-hat hackers keep humiliating vendors. Security assessment of software by source code auditing is expensive and laborious. There are only a few methods for security analysis without access to the source code, and they are usually limited in scope. This may be one reason why many major software vendors have been stuck randomly fixing vulnerabilities that have been found and providing countless patches to their clients to keep the systems protected."
On the whole the greater the level of security the more that my users complain that it is hard\ inconvenient\ unnecessary let them eat sh*t -- I do not want to seem anti - but it is really only an issue when the client on the other side of the flaw is win32. /. post below it is like putting diamonds on doodie. All that we can hope is that we (IT Professionals) can lead by example. Frequent Password Changes - Non trivial passwords - encrypted home folders - user data whatever.
Realistically none of my home boxes run M$ and I check my intrusion log in both directions about once a month and it shows zero events. OTOH based on this and the
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
Like Military Intelligence, or Microsoft Excel.
Reduce, reuse, cycle