New Protection for 802.11

[Nelson Minar]

>Reading the Wifi report, it seems their customers stampeded them and
>demanded that the security hole be fixed, fixed a damned lot sooner
>than they intended to fix it.

Which is sort of a shame, in a way. 802.11b has no pretense of media
layer security. I've been thinking of that as an opportunity for folks
to get smarter about network and application layer security - PPTP,
IPSEC, proper authentication, etc. A lot of sites are putting their
wireless access points outside the firewall and doing VPNs and the
like to build secure links.

If WiFi gets reasonable media layer security soon, that pressure will
go away and we'll go back to media-based security. I think that's a
bad thing in the long run; you end up with systems that may be
somewhat secure at the gateway/firewall but are soft inside. 

                                                     nelson at monkey.org
.       .      .     .    .   .  . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/

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