Wi[r]eless security (was: Suspend bug)

[David G. Miller]

"David G. Miller" <dave at davenjudy.org> wrote:

> es <hlhowell at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > Sounds like you did your "home" work.  Sorry about the bad pun.  But it
> > is illuminating just how much the signals can penetrate and how far they
> > can be detected, isn't it.  The range also changes if one were to place
> > a pre-amp and directional antenna on the card (as some war drivers do).
> >
> > Regards,
> > Les H
> Oh, come on.  That's not a bad pun.  Bad puns are REAL groaners.
>
> I didn't realize that WEP had become as vulnerable as it seems to be.  I 
> was also going on the assumption that the little traffic I generate 
> would make WEP key recovery difficult.  It seems that current cracking 
> tools are able elicit traffic from an AP without connecting such that 
> the key can be recovered without seeing any traffic that I actually 
> generate.  I guess the behavior isn't that surprising given how easily 
> wireless stuff connects.
>
> Looks like I need to bump the priority on implementing WPA.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>   
The deed is done.  I now have radius authenticated WPA set up for my 
AP.  I found the following articles very helpful if anyone needs to set 
up WPA-Radius:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8017
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8095
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8151

The articles assume SuSE Linux so a few directories and file names are 
different but nothing too hard to figure out.  There were a couple of 
items that the author assumed readers would "just know" that I had to do 
a little digging to figure out.  A lot depends on what you already know 
about setting up radius which for me was nada.

Of course, in the middle of all this, my laptop decided it was time to 
panic and, of course, it was while I wasn't working with it but trying 
to decipher the above articles for my situation: laptop working, turn 
away, turn back, laptop dead with caps lock key blinking.  This time I 
had been bouncing the network up and down a lot trying to debug the 
wireless with WPA.

Cheers,
Dave

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