Stronger Encryption for Wi-Fi 175
sp00 writes "The first products certified to support Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, the latest wireless security technology, were announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance on Wednesday. The Wi-Fi Alliance says WPA2 is a big improvement on earlier wireless security standards, such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which hackers have found easy to circumvent. It includes Advanced Encryption Standard, which supports 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit keys."
Question (Score:1, Interesting)
So, are MAC filters any less/more secure than WEP?
overhead (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:overhead (Score:0, Interesting)
Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh well mine is enabled
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So... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no illusions about the "security" of WiFi, no matter how encrypted it may be. The signal is traveling through open space for anyone to look at, and if you look at enough of the signal, you can find the pattern. This just increases the processing power needed by the AP and Card, further pushing the development of more advanced, procs. (Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this)
I understand that corperations are interested in this for security, but for an average joe like me, I keep my access point wide open for anyone to use. If you want to look at my GF's reciepe's or our photos, go right ahead.
Security is only as important as you make it to be.
Flaw fixed? (Score:4, Interesting)
It wouldn't be a bad idea to use something like this for non-broadcase Ethernet either, now that I think of it.
802.1x (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the real advantage to WPA here?
Re:WHY WONT SLASHDOT POST THIS STORY? (Score:1, Interesting)
AES protects entire frame (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the AES implementation they are using actually does encrypt the ethernet (MAC) address, unlike WEP. (See Tying It All Together in this article [windowsecurity.com] for corroboration of that.)
WPA2 with AES is the real deal.
So I have to upgrade...again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
WPA 2? How about WPA 1 support? (Score:2, Interesting)
To me the chief advantage of WPA is a human readable password.
Serious answer form geeks in the know...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Were talking about light traffic (email, little browsing) from 5 or 6 users about 8 hours a day.
"basically zero benefit"? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:802.1x (Score:5, Interesting)
My school *shudder* has access points in many of the labs but after a student said he was going to "hack" into it there was a simple warning:
Really, it made sense. He simply stated that there was no point in getting a signal without access rights. The man's first job was to secure the wired network. Once the AP's were put in, it wasn't a problem.
Could you run wild on your companies network by just plugging into the next available switch?
If so, fix that problem first.
The really important question. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you use WEP at the moment, some operating systems will prompt you to enter the key. Not the passphrase, but the digested key. So even though I know the passphrase, I must type 26 characters of hexidecimal into my iPaq with a stylus. Linux is no better for wireless and the last time I looked required hex too. Linux is particularly lousy if you use more than one WLAN since all the dists I've tried only store the details for one of them.
It is absolutely ludicrous. XP doesn't do that and I doubt (though I haven't tried) that OS X would either.
Given that, it would not surprise me that of those who even know to enable crypto if half don't just give up or use MAC filters or no security at all.
My preference would be whatever standard they choose be mandated to use crypto by default - and by virtue of the even longer key length it will force software makers to improve their support for it.