Wireless Security

Wireless networks are common, especially in homes. They offer quite a few advantages (and often cause a few frustrations), and in a lot of cases it just comes built into the modem/router. It’s also another point of entry into your network (and your computer).

Risks:

The risk that a wireless network poses is mostly unseen. The more powerful and efficient the wireless equipment is, the further away it works from. Eg, your neighbours, passing cars, pretty much anyone within a few hundred metres radius of your home or office. In fact, an office is a greater risk because there’s likely to be other offices nearby and the data accessible from an office network would be more valuable.

Solutions:

I’ll get straight to the point here. The following solutions exist. Read on to learn which ones are good to use and which are completely useless:

Of these only WPA and WPA2 are secure. The WEP algorithm was cracked years ago and there are easily available programs to hack into a WEP protected network. It doesn’t matter how many bits of security are used, anyone who wants to connect to your network is able to with little effort.

WPA and WPA2 can be implemented in a few ways, and for homes and small offices the PS-KEY is the preferred method. This uses a PreShared Key, and you should really use at least 20 random characters. Medium and large organisations should be using something called a Radius server.

WPA2 has a few advantages over WPA:

So why doesn’t the whole world user WPA2? WPA2 is fairly new and not many products support it. It seems to take years for computers, phones, and other gadgets to start using new protocols.

Since WPA has been around for a few years why doesn’t everyone use that? Again when wireless networks were first introduced a large number of devices were made that only supported WEP. Manufacturers were slow to update their software, and most consumers didn’t understand wireless security and hence didn’t care if it supported WEP or WPA, so the manufacturers had little reason to provide updates.

WPA is considered secure at the time of writing (2007). When the standard was created it was rushed and the main goal was to fix security problems without having to reinvent everything. So it was a compromise and it’s only a matter of time until some clever hackers come up with a way to break it. When that happens you’ll hear about it on this site.

So in summary,

If in doubt ask, or do some research.

24 September, 2007 | Filed Under Security 

Comments

2 Responses to “Wireless Security”

  1. Hacking Wireless Networks | FraudO.com on July 6th, 2009 11:49 am

    [...] while back I wrote about wireless network security, click here to see the article. Basically you have 4 ways to set up a wireless network (at home or at the [...]

  2. 130 Million Credit Cards | FraudO.com on August 29th, 2009 12:52 am

    [...] a sophisticated hacker, he just looked for businesses with wireless networks and weak security (read here on how to secure a wireless network the right way) and installed malware to do the work. [...]

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