Custom Wireless Solution

Mon Apr 23 09:11:16 UTC 2001

At 11:57 PM 22/04/2001 -0700, Mohan Sundar wrote:
>How secure is this connection? Does 802.11
>provide security implicitly?

802.11b has some degree of inherent security.
one can apply WEP (Wireless Equivalency Protocol) to encryption the data, 
but even that has been shown to be vulnerable 
(http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.html)

there are a few alternatives that can be used to make it more secure:
  [1] deploy a setup whereby one has per-user dynamically-changing WEP
      keys.  details on how one vendor can do this are at:
         http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/witc/ao350ap/prodlit/1281_pp.htm
      details on how to actually configure it is at:
         http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/wireless/airo_350/accsspts/ap350scg/ap350ch3.htm#xtocid586920

  [2] don't trust the link layer, and encrypt everything you send.
      this could be as simplistic as adding MAC-address filters to your
      access-points and building a tunnel of some kind (eg. IPsec, or
      even as simplistic as SSH port-forwarding).

if one is prone to be paranoia, using both [1] and [2] probably makes sense.

cheers,

lincoln.