Re: Wireless security

Timothy Murphy <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Moe Trin wrote:

Obviously it depends on where you live, and how valuable the data on
your computer is. In my case, for instance, I know and trust everyone
within WiFi range of my house,

You should really be checking out to ~3-5 times as far, given that the
bad guy may be using a 10 to 15 dBi antenna, which has the effect of
increasing the maximum range by that multiple in a given direction.

so we are talking of someone in a car lurking somewhere in the
vicinity, choosing my computer system to break into,

Very little choosing about it - more random chance than anything.

But why would anyone go to the trouble?
I don't know where you live, but it is quite a serious offence here
(and everywhere in the EU, I think) to break into a computer system.

and having the necessary computer savvy to break a WEP key.

You mean some ten-year-old who can use any search engine?

Again, I very much doubt if there are any 10 year olds in Dublin
with the knowledge and desire to do this.

I would say that there are far less than 1000 people in Dublin
with the ability to do this (most of them college students),
and of those less than a dozen would go round trying to break into
random computer systems.
And of those, 90% would choose a system with a large number of users -
a college system, in fact.

Say there are 2 million computers in Dublin.
The probability of someone trying to break into mine
I would estimate at less that 0.001% per year.
It's not worth worrying about risks that low.

I regard most of the worry about WiFi security
as part of the general paranoia about security
which seems to have overtaken the world since 9/11.

Rational security policy must take some account
of the statistical probability of hostile action.

My thinking tends to be like Timothy's. Perhaps I'm too trusting. In my
opinion the greatest potential problem with unencrypted wifi in a safe
environment (like my own upper middle-class neighborhood) is that a
neighbor will unintentionally connect to my network and suck
bandwidth. A keyed WEP handles that.

The other side of the coin, however, is that if WPA is relatively easy
to employ, why not utilize it and be safe? I believe, at least for my
system (Fedora 8 and a Netgear wg311v3/ndiswrapper), this is NOT the
case, i.e., it's going to be a real pain to get WPA working.
--
% Randy Yates % "She tells me that she likes me very much,
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % but when I try to touch, she makes it
%%% 919-577-9882 % all too clear."
%%%% <yates@xxxxxxxx> % 'Yours Truly, 2095', *Time*, ELO
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com
.

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