![Wireless Networking Wireless Networking](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/wireless_64.png)
![Software Software](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/software_64.png)
![Hardware Hardware](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/hardware_64.png)
Microsoft Virtually Duplicates Your Wireless Card 222
akhomerun writes "Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its experimental new VirtualWiFi Software. The free software enables Windows users to use a single wireless card to connect to multiple wireless networks simultaneously. The current build is a very primitive release, with no support for WEP or WPA encryption."
Easier Wifi Man in the middle attacks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will this make it easier
New meaning for M.I.T.M. (Score:2)
Re:Easier Wifi Man in the middle attacks? (Score:3, Informative)
Network Bridge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:5, Informative)
Only if there is routing between the two connections, which I suspect will be optional.
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:3, Insightful)
Still, this shows that even Microsoft can pull some really neat things out of its R&D division. I shall look forward to a similar feature going into the MadWiFi driver set in the coming months, and thence into the Auditor Security Toolkit.
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, this shows that even Microsoft can pull some really neat things out of its R&D division. I shall look forward to a similar feature going into the MadWiFi driver set in the coming months, and thence into the Auditor Security Toolkit.
Hey, I don't know a lot about this, but if you had your laptop in your car and were being driven (for safety reasons!) whilst you surfed the internet, could this setup allow you to start off using your home wifi connection, then continually switch to the next strongest (unencrypted) signal and hence provide some sort of wifi roaming capability?
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting idea.
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Truth is, most session state isn't tied to cookie + IP; you'd want the session to resume if a user is dropped because of a bad DUN connection. Because of DHCP, you would likely not tie it to IP unless it's of the most secure applications.
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Re:Network Bridge? (Score:2)
Only until you were arrested by the FBI for h4x0r1ng those unencrypted signals. Everyone knows that moving around while using wireless is something only 3v1l h4x0
What the crap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Source code, a simple web site, and command line operation.....what more could I ask for?
Thanks, Microsoft (geez I still feel wierd saying that....)
Re:What the crap? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the crap? (Score:5, Funny)
A primitive release with security to be added later? Sure sounds like Microsoft to me.
Re:What the crap? (Score:3, Insightful)
They released free software that makes cool stuff, quit complaining!
Re:What the crap? (Score:2)
Re:What the crap? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What the crap? (Score:3, Informative)
As such, it is nearly Open Source... but if you make modifications, you are volutarely working for Microsoft.
not too bad though...
Re:What the crap? (Score:2)
Surely that's a good thing, if it results in more MS software being released under more open-source friendly licences?
(It's also no different to any open source project - contribute fixes/features to red hat packages and you're voluntarily working for RH, etc)
Re:What the crap? (Score:2)
Great Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Informative)
Why? Do you need to connect to both wireless networks at the same time? All WiFi cards should have some profile management software, even if it is the basic stuff that comes with the OS.
Re:Great Idea (Score:2)
Maybe he lives in his office ;)
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Not SDR...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't a proper software-defined radio be the real solution, allowing connections to 2 APs simultaneously with only one antenna? Obviously Microsoft's working with what they've got, and it's certainly an interesting capability, but I'd rather see real effort on SDRs, particularly the regulatory issues therewith.
Roaming? (Score:2, Insightful)
Great idea! That would allow you to switch access points while you're on the move; similar to ordinary cellular networks. The buffering would indeed create some latency, but if both connections are already established it should hardly be noticeble.
Re:Not SDR...? (Score:2)
On a lot of cards the tuner is more then likely limited to one frequency at a time.
Now, the way I understand the A,B,G cards... they are software tuned... but I really doubt the whole mess just sends everything to the driver.
The concept is fairly simple. Filter out everything you don't want to hear, lock onto a carrier and adjust slightly for any signal drift. A slidi
Re:Not SDR...? (Score:2)
They actually talk about that on the page.
From: http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virt ualwifi/faq.htm [microsoft.com]
Q: What is the time taken by a card to switch to another wireless network?
A: This number varies across cards. It also varies across networks, and across ad hoc and infrastructure networks. In our experience, switching delays vary from 100 ms to 600 ms across commercial cards. Over special Native WiFi cards, t
802.11b SDR (Score:2)
For some steps toward 802.11b SDR, check out my student's Summer of Code [pdx.edu] project [pdx.edu]. Volunteers gratefully accepted!
An issue we didn't recognize when starting out is that 802.11b actually wants 120MHz or more of bandwidth for a single low-speed channel; it really does spread a lot. Our current hardware really only gives us 60MHz, which will capture the main lobe, which should be enough. Eventually, we might have to go to a hybrid "soft" radio where the despreading is done with some kind of front-end magic,
Awesome! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Awesome! (Score:2, Funny)
With Source ??? !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing that scares me is that their website has an image that is 960x720 px resized using img tag height and widths - Which looks like it was done in powerpoint using 3DText. I wanted to pull the code and read it to see if it was some kind of trojan or something. All in all, it looks too unprofessional (website mainly) - at least compared to all the open source project sites I've run into.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With Source ??? !!! (Score:2)
I'm getting paranoid I think.
Re:With Source ??? !!! (Score:2)
However as to the original poster, I do trust software with working code and crummy looking websites over something with a fancier website than the code. So both this Microsoft effort and a lot of the non-moribund-but-crummy-website open source projects look good to me.
Re:With Source ??? !!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The right hand and the left hand... (Score:3, Funny)
WTF (Score:3, Funny)
Re:WTF (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:2)
Original Page... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Original Page... (Score:2, Funny)
Stop asking silly questions and just boot up already.
KFG
Oh! Sources! (Score:3, Funny)
Quick! Someone brutally abuse their trust by ripping off the design and idea. Release a fully (and better) working Linux VirtualWiFi driver by tomorrow!
Hack evil minions! Hack hack hack!!!
Re:Oh! Sources! (Score:2)
Association and authentication delays (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel Centrino cards are well-known in the industry as being particularly aggressive at associating and authentication to an access point after being deauthenticated, thereby shortening the time needed to switch between different networks. It's unfortunately Centrino cards aren't on the supported list yet, they would make for an interesting evaluation target to use this kind of technology in a sort of mesh wireless network.
Thanks (Score:5, Funny)
Why should you feel weird saying that? I say it all the time. Oh wait, I normally say it sarcastically.
I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that you can acquire it MUCH cheaper while connected to say 4 diffrent WLANs, with only one PCMCIA card, then you can say with 3 diffrent physical PCMCIA, makes it I would say pretty popluar. (I'm not sure about you but my laptop only came with two slots.)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Plopping two WiFi devices (or more) between some type of routing app and I have _much_ faster bittorrent/LinuxISO/whatever downloads.
I doubt it. The two virtual WiFi devices will probably run at less than half the speed each.
Or if you're only worried about doubling the speed of the internet connection, and not the wireless, you're better off with a dedicated router hard wired to both internet connections with a single wireless network on the other end of the NAT.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Connecting two wireless networks may be 'cool,' but how many offices maintain two separate wireless networks?
Seems more likely to be used for using two wireless networks from different people than from a single one. Now you can have your laptop talk to your internal network at the same time you leech internet access off your neighbor. In a roaming application you can search out new wifi connections while maintaining your original one, and then hand off the connection seemlessly (for UDP or other non-co
Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Watch this space.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)
Multiple cards: The kernel implementation of VirtualWiFi supports multiple cards. However, we have not incorporated this support in the user level code of this release.
Meaning its going to be, if not already implemented in the Longhorn kernel. They're definatly aiming this at something, and since there's a user level implementation being created it means that whatever it is will probably be out before Vista has fully taken hold.
Not necessarily a good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
But if everyone and their brother started using these things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with a huge amount of hookup requests.
Now admittedly I don't know much about the guts of an AP, and how limited their processing ability is (apart from bandwidth)... but this certainly isn't what they were designed for. I would be surprised if they could handle this kind of abuse from multiple users.
Or am I completely off base?
Re:Not necessarily a good thing? (Score:3, Informative)
I think this would depend more on how the wNIC behaves than on the AP's abilities...
As the simplest case, why officially disconnect from AP #1 to join AP #2? Due to the flaky nature of wireless in general (not to mention sleep mode (the radio, not the PC) as part of the 802.11 standard), APs need to gracefully deal with vanishing clients all the time. This j
Awesome (Score:3, Funny)
If I connect them to each other, not only can I send files, email, pictures, etc to my computer from my computer, but with this technology I can do it wirelessly.
Bonding? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bonding? (Score:2)
Double speed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Double speed (Why Funny?) (Score:2, Interesting)
Servers use multiple NICs to increase bandwidth. Why shouldn't a wireless user do the same?
can this be done on OS X with bridging? (Score:2)
Would
Re:can this be done on OS X with bridging? (Score:2)
Re:can this be done on OS X with bridging? (Score:2)
Re:can this be done on OS X with bridging? (Score:2)
Now if Windows would connect to one network... (Score:2)
It's already implemented in Linux (Score:2, Informative)
This is yesterday's press release I found http://i-newswire.com/pr48263.html [i-newswire.com]
and link to their site http://www.wilibox.com/index.php?id=wili [wilibox.com]
Cross Polination (Score:2)
YAY Microsoft!
You knew it was happening, it would be really nice if serious open source projects stayed away from this stuff until there is a decisive technological leader/standard.
With Wi-Fi equipment hitting $20 only 2 years after it was created there will definitly be a push by the Hardware Manufacturers to try to implement a more expensive standard, lets not let that happen.
./team HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Here's an idea I had.... (Score:2)
1. Receive Wi-Fi (or use my EV-DO card for a a connection)
2. Reserve it, making it look like the airport lounge's version
3. Replace every google ad served with my own!
4. Steal credit card numbers, etc
5. Profit!
Of course, I wouldn't really do this, but since such an attack is very possible, I'm VERY ca
Re:Here's an idea I had.... (Score:2)
Just to prevent this attack. Your bank DOES use an end-to-end encrypted communication, yet?
Otherwise, internet banking wouldn't work at all...
Re:Here's an idea I had.... (Score:2)
Similar to cell networks. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good things about this technology:
- I see this technology being used to reduce handoff delays between networks, or even between access points. The neat thing is that it does it on the client side, not the infrastructure side.
- The thing that this is going to be best at is mitigating the problems streaming video or audio across a network, where delays of 50ms can kill your stream.
- Solutions like MobileIP where each AP becomes aware of a care-of address that the client was previously associated with help handoff, but require new firmware on the access point or router. This puts that intelligence on the client side. Increasing the queue depths on both sides couldn't hurt, however.
- Because 90-95% of the handoff time between access points is a rescan for new channels, keeping a session going between two different networks and being aware of the channels around you will actually reduce congestion and handoff time because there is no rescan and its consequent flood of PROBE frames which clog the channel with BROADCAST responses!
- Because the clients will retain knowledge of who's around them, the access point's BROADCAST frames can come less often than the present ~100ms, increasing the available bandwidth.
Not-so-good things about this tech:
- Not a lot.
- Subnet resolution might be a problem, no, wait, it wouldn't because they maintain a separate IP address for each virtual adapter. However, if those IP addresses are on the same subnet and someone pings the broadcast address of the subnet, the clients on the other network might respond as well... but I guess that would only happen if the virtual adapters were bridged.
That's usually the problem with things like MobileIP - some routers don't get the message and update their routing tables so packets get duplicated all over the place.
- Available IP address space problems. If everyone is opening two sessions...
- Doesn't support WEP, but who cares. Everything important should be encrypted at the application level anyway. Thing that concerns me is the lack of 802.1x support.
All in all, not a bad idea. I hope to see more out of these guys. I'm taking this down to the lab to run tcpdump and airopeek on it.
Not to bash M$ as this is actually cool (Score:2)
Not free software (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not free software (Score:2)
So what?
Your post has nothing to do with GP anonymous post:
Cloned version appearing as a loadable Linux kernel module in 3... 2... 1...
where he indeed makes a point, I would like to make a recount of the number of posts on
Re:Not free software (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not free software (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not free software (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Linux equivalent (Score:4, Informative)
Layer 3 aliasing is not the same thing as multiple physical/radio connections. If anything it's more like channel bonding than aliasing.
That said, I don't know how useful this would be. I mean for a windows box it is. I could see the usefulness of this for a repeater but in such cases I'd just use linux and save the license fees.
Tom
Re:Linux equivalent (Score:2, Insightful)
The above allows you to associate to more than one wireless network using just one wireless card. Try plugging your regular nic into two switches at once and see how it goes...
Re:Linux equivalent (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux equivalent (Score:2)
Re:Linux equivalent (Score:2)
Re:nothing new (Score:2)
Re:nothing new (Score:2)
Sure: ifconfig eth0 alias 192.168.2.10 netmask 255.255.255.0
Re:nothing new (Score:2)
Windows has been able to alias an interface at the IP level since at least NT 4.0 (TCP/IP section of network configuration, Advanced...)
Re:nothing new (Score:2)
Re:Brute force removal by regedit...ugggh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Brute force removal by regedit...ugggh (Score:2)
Did you read what you posted? "Is there a brute force method?" is asked by someone for whom the regular uninstall isn't working. They offer the registry instructions to help people do a complete manual clean-out should things go wrong. Fairly standard stuff, especially for pre-release stuff.
Re:Brute force removal by regedit...ugggh (Score:2)
Re:Brute force removal by regedit...ugggh (Score:2)
Re:Brute force removal by regedit...ugggh (Score:2)
Re:WinModem (Score:2)
Sigh. "They did not work on Linux" is entirely wrong. The phrase you are looking for is "Linux drivers were not available". There is NO reason why Linux cannot work with a software based modem. Your beef is with the modem manufacturer for not having drivers, not Microsoft trying to "discourage people from using a different OS".
Re:Winmodem Drivers for Linux (Score:2)
The point is that once you move the processing of a WiFi signals to a proprietary software simulator the hardware will no longer work under Linux.
No No NOOOOO! The moment you add new capabilities to a windows driver, then the linux driver won't have these capabilities. Sheesh. So, let me get this straight: By your logic if I add a
Re:No WEP or WPA? (Score:2)
Re:neat, let's test it (Score:3, Insightful)
I do. You're welcome to associate to it, hell, you can even sniff my traffic if you want. Anything of any real value is already going over SSH or SSL.
WEP/WPA is for tinfoil-hat wearers. If you wanted security, you would not be using wireless.