Wi-Fi Security

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Introduction
Wi-Fi facilitates ease of use and is getting increasingly popular with homes and businesses. Multiple Wi-Fi Access Points can be located in a given area. Wi-Fi security issues continue to be a problem, as the number of Access Points grows.
Evolution of War Driving
War driving initially originated from the term war dialing a technique that was popularized by the character in the movie ‘WarGames’. War driving emerged as the practice of moving around in a vehicle and hunting wireless access points with weak security. Years later, it is still practiced on a large scale however the difference is that now it has became easier to exploit (even script kiddies are doing it at ease) as there’s a plethora of tutorials on breaking wireless authentication
Implications of Weak Wi-Fi Security
Terrorism
Terrorism is a growing threat in modern times. Ultimately all activities need co-ordination and such co-ordination is facilitated by communication. Terrorist activities need communication as well as any other activity. In order to avoid getting traced, such communication can be done over secure lines on open public networks or hacked private networks.
Scenario 1: A Terrorist visits a McDonald’s Restaurant with a portable computer and connects to the open Wi-Fi network available.
Scenario 2: A Terrorist is war driving on the streets, hunting weak APs with poor security (like WEP). Once such an SSID is found, a cracking process is initiated. Once the cracking process successfully reveals the ‘secret key’ used for authentication, a connection is made to the AP and communication can be initiated.
In both the scenarios, a backtracking (For example using an IP Address to determine from where the communication was initiated) would not lea...

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...hould be simple enough to be used by a non-technical end user.
Ultimately the end users turn out to be the weak link in the security chain as they ignore the latest security trends and install outdated devices that do not support the latest security features. An example would be that of an outdated wireless router that does not support WPA encryption. By proposing a simple solution that lets the users configure their wireless access points for best possible security, the problem can be nipped in the bud.

References:
Wireless infidelity I: war driving
Hal Berghel
September 2004
Communications of the ACM , Volume 47 Issue 9

http://www.securitycentral.org.nz/wardriving/
“Bruteforcing Wireless Protected Setup” by Stefan Viehböck http://sviehb.wordpress.com/ WarDriving & Wireless Penetration Testing
By Russ Rogers, Frank Thornton

Wi-Fi Security: Stewart Miller

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