New WEP attack found - cracks in seconds

[oBFusC8r]

It is not really news that WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) has been severely broken for a long time (major design flaws), but recently a paper revealed new ways of attacking the security protocol that effectively renders it totally useless.

Check out this page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexholy/archive/2006/08/07/690912.aspx

To be secure, migrate to WPA/WPA2.

Still, WEP is better than nothing at all since it still protects from neighbors accidently using your router as a gateway to the Internet...but that's about it.

[mouser]

nice find.

ps. another thing you can do is many routers now have an access control list where you can configure specific devices (by their mac addresses) that are allowed to connect to your wireless router.  just remember that if a friend comes over you will need to add their wireless cards mac adress to your allowed list.

[oBFusC8r]

regarding MAC addresses. From security point of view MAC addresses shall not be relied upon since they are available in the ip packets, thus an attacker is able to see the MAC addresses of the computers communicating in a wireless network and may change the MAC address of his NIC (possible using software) to match one of them.
One thing that MAC addresses are really useful for is to create a static DHCP list.

[mouser]

YIPES! i didn't know that!

* mouser runs to change his home networking setup.

[f0dder]

MAC address access limitation is okay for preventing against "the casual 'hacker'"... but nothing more than that, indeed. Unfortunately our access point is unstable enough as it is, and it's almost unusable when I enable WEP (which obviously also is rather useless), so we run an "open" accesspoint with only MAC address limitation here :/

I'm going to look into getting a new AP with WPA when the next paycheck arrives... just seems a bit silly for *me* to purchase it when it's the *girlfriend* that has a laptop. But of course she'd never shell out for hardware, and I hate having a 20m UTP cable all over the floor, so... 

[Rover]

about the only real secure way to run wireless is using a Radius server or a 3rd party encryption scheme.

There was a nice blackpaper written on this a couple of years ago.  Can't find this link ... 

[mwb1100]

about the only real secure way to run wireless is using a Radius server or a 3rd party encryption scheme.

Or you run the AP open, but access the network beyond the AP using a VPN and allow only the VPN traffic to go anywhere beyond the AP.  This generally means you need another router between the wireless AP and the rest of your network.

[jgpaiva]

G.... Bad news. I'm sorry to know that, my hardware doesn't support anything better than wep. I guess i'll have to use some mac filtering