Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

Wed Sep 11 17:13:52 UTC 2002

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 07:08:53PM +0200, John Angelmo wrote:
> Jared Mauch wrote:
> In some way you are right, but still I think it's even worse to use WEP 
> cause then the admins might think it's safe, it takes about 15 minutes 
> to crack a wepkey, so instead of drive-by spamming you could call it 
> drive-by, have a bagle, start spamming.

	I'm not trying to fix the underlying wireless encryption
option just provide a simple way that the manufacturers can ship
a 'more secure' out-of-the-box-product.

> The most hardware/software indipendent solution I have seen so far is 
> the use of VPN, simply place the WLAN outside your own LAN.

	Absolutely.

	There are a lot of things one can do:

	1) enable wep
	2) rotate wep keys
	3) authenticate by mac-address
	4) restrict dhcp to known mac-addresses
	5) force utilization of vpn/ipsec client

	Obviously not all of these solutions are available
in all cases, but in a home or small lan-environment a subset of
these will increase security (even if it's reinforcing the screen door
with 1/16" of balsa wood)

	- jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.