A techie question

Posted on March 1, 2004 by acb

I have had to re-reconfigure the wireless network on my return from Jerusalem, since the hotel I was in didn’t use any WEP encryption on their network. I can never remember how to generate a WEP key and there seems to be no way to save it when I switch the encryption off. So I switched off all WEP encryption back here and simply locked down the router so that only the card in the laptop could access it. Is this really secure? In one sense, I know it is, since it would be a very lucky hacker indeed who found a parking place in range of my network. But I assume that if you had a sniffer and a parking place, you could now eavesdrop on my network, even if you couldn’t get access to the internet from there.

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3 Responses to A techie question

  1. danny says:
    March 1, 2004 at 4:25 pm

    Yes, that’s true – and it’s pretty easy to logon to your network too, since MACs – the ethernet ID that the router uses to identify you – are easily detected and changed (for ridiculously longwinded values of “easy”).

    I really don’t worry too much about sniffing; the biggest issue, I suppose, is email passwords and http logins which are often sent in plaintext. Also Web cookies, which can give away an awful lot of access without passwords being needed at all.

    Range can be extended by means of someone sitting a long way away from you but pointing at you with a Pringles can. But at this point in the hypothetical chain, I’d imagine the sinister organisation devoted to spying on Andrew Brown which is bankrolling them would spring for something a little more reliable, like a keyboard-logger or a tiny gnome with a tape-recorder.

  2. el Patron says:
    March 2, 2004 at 8:28 am

    I like the idea, though, of Security the Residents’ Parking Permits being outwitted by the Black Hat Pringle Team.

  3. Rupert says:
    March 4, 2004 at 2:31 am

    And anyway, if your personal tiger team has a comfy enough van to sit in — presumably with the modern day equivalents of really big tape recorders, massive headphones, capacious ash trays and with Starbucks coffee cups instead of styrofoam — they can deconstruct WEP before their bums get numb.

    For the record, I save my WEP keys in notepad files on my desktop, and cut and paste them into the configuration fields of the wireless network when I move between networks.

    This is, of course, reprehensible.

    But at least it means I can have WEP at home and at Louise’s, and the many other wireless network clients nearby have no chance of logging in by accident (as I did on someone else’s network last time I was in Edinburgh). I think this counts as ‘security’.

    R

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