[ale] About Wireless Connectivity

Joe jknapka at earthlink.net
Fri Mar 28 13:35:05 EST 2003


"D. Alan Stewart" <astewart at layton-graphics.com> writes:

> Would you care to elaborate as to why?

Alan, I'm assuming you're referring to:

> 
> Bob Toxen wrote:
[snip]
> >
> >Btw, WEP is close to worthless for security.  Turning off broadcasting
> >and using MAC filtering are very close to worthless.  Don't use it unless
> >you use a good VPN strategy!

Re. WEP: Google for "airsnort" and "WEPcrack". These tools, among others,
permit WEP keys to be cracked in a matter of minutes on a busy network.

Re. MAC filtering: MAC addresses are easily spoofed, if you have
hardware and drivers that support it. I imagine many wireless cards
and drivers do. Many wired Ethernet cards certainly do.

Re. turning off broadcasting: I'm not sure about this one, but I expect
the reason it's not useful is that as long as there's some wireless
traffic for an intruder to examine, he'll be able to get into your
network. So not broadcasting only makes you safer if you don't use
your wireless network for anything else, either.

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka
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