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."

Comments

Re:Security is relative

[Omnifarious]

Lack of security in wireless isn't that huge of a deal. If you meet a skilled hacker, no matter what you throw at him/her they will be able to beat it.

Bzzzt! Wrong! I really hope you aren't a programmer.

There are encryption algorithms and protocols that are so good that nobody has figured how to defeat them, most likely even including the secret labs of various governments. Mostly what happens is that in practice they are misapplied or the person applying them doesn't understand them well enough and cuts a corner that results in a fatal implementation flaw.

What I really don't get is public standards that have this problem.

Those facile assumptions of yours as well as the pervasive defeatist attitude are likely the main reason there are so many problems in various commercial products.