This article covers the various forms of wireless data transmission, and addresses the main security problems in WiFi today.
This article covers the various forms of wireless data transmission, and addresses the main security problems in WiFi today.
I think this article is too vague, i.e. it just says what a lot of people already know, WEP is crackable, given enough packets, etc, and doesn’t really add anything new to the discussion.
Also, to the osnews’ers out there with linux: what can I you use to secure a home wlan if you use linux? I see too many articles that are xp-only, and a few talking about mac’s, and i really hate the if-you-are-using-linux-you-are-a-leet-hax0r-and-you-should-already-kno w-it-all mentality.
Depends. What wireless card are you using? What access point are you using? Do they both support WPA/WPA2? What Linux distro are you using? Does it support wpa_supplicant?
If you are lucky enough to have an AP that support WPA, a wireless NIC that supports WPA, and a Linux distro that includes wpa_supplicant, then it’s a simple matter of:
– configuring /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf for your network
– starting the wpa_supplicant
– running dhclient on your wireless interface
If you don’t have any of that, then you have to much around with IPSec, VPNs, and such.
Or, run FreeBSD, where all this is nicely integrated into the network stack, and editing two config files is all you need to do (add ifconfig_<wnic>0=”WPA DHCP” to /etc/rc.conf, and edit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf).
I havent decided on which AP yet, but I have some cheap-o Realtek PCMCIA 802.11b-based card and i’m using linspire 5.0 (and linspire is using ndiswrapper to support this card). I dunno if the drivers support wpa, probably not.
But thanks for the pointers, i’ll try and find if I have wpa_supplicant, if wpa works, and maybe buy a nice AP.
p.s.: FreeBSD… someday maybe =)