Wifi Security

Mon Nov 21 22:29:50 UTC 2005

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

<snip>
>
>> What do you learn by looking at someone's ipsec, ssl-wrappered, or ssh
>> tunneled traffic?
>
> no, we're not trying to do that, you dont really think that because its
> encrypted it cant be decrypted do you?

I do believe (reasonably so, I think) that if I'm going have a 
conversation with a second party whom I already trust, that a third party 
will have trouble inserting themself into the path of that conversation 
without revealing their presence..

<snip>

> you dont have to break the code if the endpoints trust sessions with you and
> share their encryption keys

Successfully inserting yourself in the middle requires some 
social-engineering or really bad protocol design. The former can be 
mitigated through vigilance, the later falls into the realm of peer review 
and security research.

If I may paraphrase the original posters question (Ross Hosman), it was:

Do large wireless buildouts present a new security threat due to the 
potential to spoof AP's?

The answer to that is no, this is a threat we live with currently. We have 
tools to mitigate the risks associated with it.

You can say that consumers are stupid, and won't figure this out, and that 
may be true; however when it's starts to cost them losts money, they will 
sit-up take notice and buy tools to solve this problem for them, just like 
they do with any other security threat that goes beyond being an anoyance. 
probably said product will be blue, say linksys on it, and have the word 
vpn (among others) buried on the packaging someplace.

> Steve
>

-- 
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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