Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/03/29/wardriver.html Tales of a White Hat War Driver by Alan Rothberg 03/29/2002 "I realized what I was finding was not a failure of the technology, but a human failure. Sure, WEP isn't great and it can be broken, we all know that, but it is at least a good "front door." The process of cracking the WEP keys is much more time consuming, especially on a slow network, than most hackers are willing to hang around for (unless they live next door). After studying my logs, tracking down owners of these networks was relatively easy. In hopes of aiding some of these folks, I called them, introduced myself, and told them what I had found. I got a variety of responses. Many people were simply not aware of this security issue, and admitted they just took the device out of the box and plugged it in. Also, many smaller shops had "professionals" come in and install their equipment, but security was never discussed. One IT manager, shocked that I had found him from so far away, admitted that they chose not to use WEP because of the overhead involved. True, you can expect to reduce your throughput about 1 Mb/sec using WEP, but I think the trade off is worth it. " 1:05:27 PM     OpenAP [ Home ] [ What Is OpenAP ] [ Screenshots ] [ FAQ ] [ Getting Started ] [ Hardware ] [ Sources ] [ Bugs ] [ Email Forum ] [ Credits ] [ Links ] [ Sponsors ] [ Disclaimer ] Welcome to opensource.instant802.com,              Where 802.11 meets Open-Source Software Here you can find the complete source code, build environment, and instructions for flashing an 802.11 access point with linux 2.4.17. The end product is a linux-based access point providing full wireless services, including multipoint to multipoint wireless bridging (802.1d), while at the same time distributing fully standard 802.11b connections to end users. 12:30:30 PM

© Copyright 2002 Jon Schull. Last update: 12/18/2002; 2:21:43 PM.