"followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago"
I think we need to make the point that there's a difference between a flaw in the encryption algorithm and the length of a key. Any code is crackable if you have enough time to generate every single possible key. As time passes, machines get faster and doing a brute-force attack on a 56-bit DES key doesn't look like a massive problem any more. If the algorithm is broken, it's effectively a shortcut to finding the key without having to try every permutation.
The problem with all of these reports is that someone in senior management will read "wireless LAN insecurity overhyped" without understanding the context, go down the local PC store, buy some consumer wireless router, plug it into the network and when the security guys complain, they point to the Gartner article.
We get this everyday at work. What (at least our) senior management guys don't understand is that it's possible to implement virtually anything, but there's a stupid way of doing it (with big security holes and without enterprise management in mind) and an intelligent, more secure (and yes, let's face it, probably more expensive) way. But for an organisation with nearly 15,000 PCs, it's hard to manage those 200 Linksys wireless routers individually...
It's tabloid headline grabbing, that's all. Nothing new here.
Actually, I heard that the British Government sold the German cipher machines to the commonwealth countries for some years, claiming that the codes hadn't been broken. And all the while, decoding their messages...
Slashdot Mirror
"followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago"
300 years is "ancient"? Really??
I think we need to make the point that there's a difference between a flaw in the encryption algorithm and the length of a key. Any code is crackable if you have enough time to generate every single possible key. As time passes, machines get faster and doing a brute-force attack on a 56-bit DES key doesn't look like a massive problem any more. If the algorithm is broken, it's effectively a shortcut to finding the key without having to try every permutation.
The problem with all of these reports is that someone in senior management will read "wireless LAN insecurity overhyped" without understanding the context, go down the local PC store, buy some consumer wireless router, plug it into the network and when the security guys complain, they point to the Gartner article.
We get this everyday at work. What (at least our) senior management guys don't understand is that it's possible to implement virtually anything, but there's a stupid way of doing it (with big security holes and without enterprise management in mind) and an intelligent, more secure (and yes, let's face it, probably more expensive) way. But for an organisation with nearly 15,000 PCs, it's hard to manage those 200 Linksys wireless routers individually...
It's tabloid headline grabbing, that's all. Nothing new here.
Rant over.
I'm on Orange, who I've found to be the best customer care. Vodafone were OK, but One2One are useless. I'd agree - go for Orange.
Actually, I heard that the British Government sold the German cipher machines to the commonwealth countries for some years, claiming that the codes hadn't been broken. And all the while, decoding their messages...