Wireless Security
It’s a beautiful sunny day, you’re lying in your hammock under a cloudless sky surfing the internet on your laptop when you notice your network has just slowed to a crawl, you frantically check each setting and assured that you’re ok, you go back to your peaceful ignorance, practicing patience while each page struggles to load. What has happened? Is your computer defective? Are aliens about to attack? While all of these are possible (albeit very unlikely), it’s more likely that someone has helped themselves to your bandwidth via your wireless network. Anyone can hack a wireless network now days. It’s so trivial I don’t even think it’s still considered hacking. If you run a WEP network, chances are you’ve already been “hacked”, but don’t fret, through this short on wireless security, I’ll help you get that pesky network locked down tight!
First things first, the security triangle, why I have drawn in a triangle is because
Before we can even consider a more secure solution for your troubles,
We need to consider the consequences, first and foremost if you want
a secure network, you have to give up one of the other two points.
No network that runs securely is going to be running as fast as it
could, this is true both trough copper and through the air.
WEP, the wired equivalent privacy. Now I don’t know where they
got the idea WEP was inherently as secure as wired jobs, but that’s what it is called. WEP’s authentication is through a numerical key, written in hexadecimal and the keys are either 64bits or 128 bits in length. The trouble is the algorithm WEP is coded with is flawed greatly and allows attackers to retrieve the encryption key with a modest amount of packets, say a sum of 10,000 to break a 64bit network and about 250,000 packets to successfully break into a WP2 network.
The solution of course is a new protocol, called WPA and its revision, WPA2. WPA2 is a very secure protocol for wireless communication. It can only be broken by capturing the keyword exchange and then brute forcing the key, which could take years. WPA2 uses a pre-shared key, which means that each key has to be hard coded with the server’s key. Additionally, you can use RADIUS or NIS. To hack into a WPA network, the attacker will usually kick off a network host and force them to re-authenticate. In doing this, the attacker captures the key. Unfortunately, people are lazy and will choose a key they can remember (Boston red socks) for instance. When the attack brute forces the key, any dictionary based passwords are found frighteningly fast, randomly generated keys are generally way more secure! Do not ever use an easily guessable password for your wireless network.
To wrap this up, if you have to use an easily guessable password, don’t be surprised to have virtual quests, when you use WPA2, make sure to use a generated password that has a lot of randomness to it! Security is paramount.
