[Chester LUG] WiFi Terror

[Michael Crilly]

I believe WPA is backwards compatible with WEP enabled hardware (but not 
WPA2 as the chipsets can't do the processing). WPA is an improvement 
over WEP as it uses better encryption, it doesn't directly use master 
keys and it's IV has been increased to 48, from 24, and as such you have 
trillions of key combinations, instead of about 17 million. WPA2 
requires completely new hardware.

I think ISPs should be taking on the responsibility of ensuring people's 
security, as far as wireless technology at home goes, anyway. This can 
be done by shipping wireless routers with only WPA2 enabled, minimum key 
requirements and a decent password policy on the router's administration 
panel, etc. That being said it can't be too easy as you end up 
sacrificing security for convenience, which is never good.

On 13/07/11 16:15, Bryn Salisbury wrote:
> The question for me is whether or not older units in circulation have been updated to support WPA2. I know that there are still a load of 1st generation BT Home Hubs out there which still work on WEP, and the other question is how often people update their wifi passwords (I bet most provider-issued devices are still set to their factory WEP/WPA2 keys).
>
> Buzz Out Loud did a long segment about Wifi routers a few weeks ago, and my recent (painful) experience trying to reconfigure my own HomeHub made me wonder how many 'normal' people actually look (or even know they should look) at such things?
>
> B
>
> On 13 Jul 2011, at 16:10, Michael Crilly wrote:
>
>    
>> Mind you most residential gateways come with WPA2 as standard now (the article was a few years back), so hopefully this will not be as easy to do.
>>
>> On 13/07/11 16:08, Les Pritchard wrote:
>>      
>>> Yes that's a great story, there's a lot of this going on sadly. If you've upset anyone - don't use WiFi :-)
>>>
>>> On 13 July 2011 15:23, Michael Crilly<mrcrilly at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> I've just started reading this on Arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/wifi-hacking-neighbor-from-hell-gets-18-years-in-prison.ars - quite scary! It just goes to show you what you can do with some tools off of the Internet and some basic knowledge.
>>>
>>> This could be a story for your company's website, Les ;-)
>>>
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> --
> Bryn Salisbury
> http://about.me/bryns/bio
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