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."

Easier Wifi Man in the middle attacks?

[random_culchie]

You need two Wifi cards to do some man in the middle attacks..

Will this make it easier ;)

Network Bridge?

[AnimeEd]

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

Great Idea

[pinkocommie]

I currently use dual nics to connect to my home and office network as I presume a lot of other people do, this should help reduce costs in similar scenarios. I didnt install it cause of the WEP/WPA limitations, did anyone else try it? If so does this allow bridging connections?

Not SDR...?

[ottffssent]

The blurb makes it sound like this is essentially a way to quickly switch the hardware from one AP to another, buffering packets until the hardware is connected to the proper AP. I'm curious how efficient this process is, as there's bound to be some switching latency. For low-bandwidth non-latency-bound tasks, I assume it's virtually seamless, but I wonder how non-latency-bound you'd need a task to be before it starts becoming problematic.

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.

With Source ??? !!!

[Gopal.V]

Microsoft releasing tech previews with source code ? I mean, what has the world come to ?. Oh, sure it is under Shared Source license - but it raises serious questions about the way MS is dealing with the latest challenge from F/OSS. After all students are the major inflow of talent into F/OSS (starting from Linus Torvalds ...).

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.

Association and authentication delays

[Anonymous Coward]

The comments on the website indicate that the code buffers traffic meant for another AP between switching networks. This of course is hindered by the time it takes to complete the 802.11 authentication and association exchange as indicated with the suggested timer values for the supported wireless cards.

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.

Re:Not free software

[Tim C]

So what? As long as it's not patented, how does that prevent a clean-room implementation for Linux?

I wonder...

[Capt James McCarthy]

How much use this will really get. Connecting two wireless networks may be 'cool,' but how many offices maintain two separate wireless networks? I am sure there are some, as some of you will surly point out. If you want an internal wireless network, that should already exist since you wireless network should be behind your router/firewall anyways.

Whats Microsoft Smoking?

[rollonet]

I was suprised when they made an MSN Search plugin for Firefox (http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/09/2 9/475316.aspx [msdn.com]) But this...

Interesting...

[EddyPearson]

Its very strange that Microsoft would be doing this, totally out of chatacter for them which makes me think that using multiple wireless networks is something that going to play an integral part of a future product.

Watch this space.

Re:Not free software

[gowen]

And even if it is patented, those of us in the Land Of The Free (i.e. outside America) are still free to create a clean room implementation.

It's not a feature, it's a bug.

[twitter]

I've read reports of XP home making "bridges" between networks without being asked. Sales men walking into a business would "bridge" the network with a neighbor's. Needless to say, the person who reported this was not happy they could suddenly see all of their neighbor's windoze network and vice versa. Thanks, Microsoft, indeed.

This just doesn't look like typical Microsoft, and IMO that's a good thing...Source code, a simple web site, and command line operation.....what more could I ask for?

You could ask for the ability to modify and redistribute the code. I'll believe Microsoft has changed when they embrace the GPL, quit paying people to badmouth everyone, stop pulling SCO stunts.

Double speed

[JDStone]

I'm wondering if you could effectively double your speed by connecting to more than one access point. Wireless access is everywhere today, you could set up your laptop and instantly get at least 2 access point connections almost anywhere, like San Francisco for example.

Re:I wonder...

[anthony_dipierro]

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-connection based apps, anyway). Actually, with a properly established NAT network (using some help from a computer on a permanent link) you could hand off a live TCP connection.

My laptop currently has two wireless cards in it. One has Verizon Wireless Broadband Access and the other is plain old 54 meg wifi. When public access wifi becomes as widespread as Verizon's service I could drop the Verizon card and either add a second wifi card or use this software and have the extra PCMCIA slot. Then again, a better solution in that situation would be to set up a wifi card on my desktop machine and hard wire that machine to my wireless base station. So I guess roaming is the more practical application.

Re:Easier Wifi Man in the middle attacks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that in infrastructure mode you could successfully connect to an AP's SSID and then advertise yourself as that same AP without confusing your own connection to that AP first and formost.
If you're talking about using 2 cards on 1 WEP/WPA enabled AP to have one create traffic with the AP and have the other listen to all the traffic eventually collecting enough data to make a guess at a passphrase, then I suppose that if you didn't physically need to be listening to the traffic while creating it, this could have been done with only 1 card before this software was available. Since this software doesn't change whether you can independantly listen to your own traffic (from what I read) I don't think it helps with this kind of cracking either.

Re:Great Idea

[b0bby]

My wife uses 2 cards; her office network requires Cisco authentication which isn't supported by the built in wireless card, but at home the built in gets a better signal & you don't have the card hanging out the side.

Re:Double speed (Why Funny?)

[SithLordOfLanc]

I'm not sure the poster meant this to be funny.

Servers use multiple NICs to increase bandwidth. Why shouldn't a wireless user do the same?

Re:Network Bridge?

[AGMW]

Considering that it's a first release of an experimental package that performs a function that few if any have ever done before, no, it's not the best idea to use it. Even the most basic encryption is not yet there.

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?