Microsoft Virtually Duplicates Your Wireless Card

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."

Not free software

[frp001]

This is Shared Source NOT free software.

Original Page...

[perlionex]

... found using Google, at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/ranveer/multinet/ software.htm [cornell.edu] And the author's page, which follows quite naturally: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/ranveer/ [cornell.edu] ...which, if you look at it, will explain the origins of this "Microsoft" project :) His papers on "MultiNet" date back to June 2003.

Re:What the crap?

[Jugalator]

I see it's from their research division... They sometimes seem uncorrupted by their marketing machine. ;-) They have other projects going on too, like ConferenceXP [conferencexp.net] (yes indeed, source here too), and Netscan [microsoft.com]. Kind of interesting projects [microsoft.com] actually.

Re:Linux equivalent

[tomstdenis]

While I'm a linux fan, if the summary is accurate, you're comment is off-base.

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:I wonder...

[svanstrom]

You could use it to share a WLAN with a second computer/PDA/whatever, which can't connect directly... either because it's too far away, or isn't allowed (hasn't paid, not part of the company or simply blocked because some idiot login-requirements forcing people to use IE).

Re:Network Bridge?

[Fortress]

Does this mean we can connect to an AP and then connect using ad-hoc using the same card to another computer? This would result in a relay

Only if there is routing between the two connections, which I suspect will be optional.

Re:I wonder...

[svanstrom]

"NAT, usb-powered etherenet switch and a couple cables" or software that makes it work without all that... not really something you have to think twice about, esp. not if you don't want to be forced to sit next to the WLAN-connected computer (or if you don't want everyone else to see what you're doing); besides, there's a lot of stuff out there which handles WLAN but not ethernet...

Re:WTF

[cduffy]

Yes, but as pointed out in another post [slashdot.org], the actual innovation [cornell.edu] happened before the fellow [cornell.edu] was hired.

Re:What the crap?

[FST777]

The Microsoft Research Shared Source license agreement (MSR-SSLA) is actually a license, made by Microsoft, which permit free use of the software and the source (if any) for non-commercial use, provided that any modification are subject to the license (in which Microsoft may make full use of the software).

As such, it is nearly Open Source... but if you make modifications, you are volutarely working for Microsoft.

not too bad though...

Re:Not necessarily a good thing?

[pla]

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.

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 just looks like a client has gone missing for a few packets - So it would just buffer them and retransmit when it reappears.

On the wNIC side, though, you could well have some NASTY latencies, depending on how quickly the card can change its entire configuration.

Re:Great Idea

[glesga_kiss]

I currently use dual nics to connect to my home and office network as I presume a lot of other people do

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:I wonder...

[anthony_dipierro]

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:Network Bridge?

[morgan_greywolf]

Does this mean we can connect to an AP and then connect using ad-hoc using the same card to another computer? This would result in a relay

Only if there is routing between the two connections, which I suspect will be optional.

Or bridging. Windows XP has built-in bridging. Bridging is different than routing in that it occurs on Layer 2, while routing occurs on Layer 3.

It's already implemented in Linux

[bulbbulb]

There's already implemented Linux IEEE 802.11 stack supporting multiple BSSID ( Virtual AP ) and multiple client mode ( Virtual STA ) connections on the same radio interface simultaneously. And it supports WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryption on every virtual interface. And it's linux thing!!
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]

Re:Not free software

[DeadMeat (TM)]

You don't need the code. The author has written multiple papers [cornell.edu] on its inner workings. He even gave a talk to our CS department that gave more than enough information for someone to duplicate his work, were they so inclined.

Re:Easier Wifi Man in the middle attacks?

[rikkards]

Nope Just get a Prism2 based card and you don't need two. SMC has a good one then you just use Airodump and Airopeek, the latest beta (2.1?) has the ability to inject and scan at the same time. Been a while since I played with it.

Re:Network Bridge?

[Martin Blank]

Possibly. Without being within the same network, though, that could create session issues. Posting to sites that match both cookies and IP addresses would be difficult, if not impossible. I'm not sure that SSL/TLS would be at all possible. However, accessing normal mapping sites could probably be relatively seamless.

Interesting idea.