How Secure is Your Wireless Network?

Wireless network transmission was considered a boon. Journalist and media personnel were the first to latch on to the technology as the editing could be done immediately and sent via internet. The ease of wireless connectivity though advantageous was soon to become a problem as TCP/IP did not have authentication and encryption for transfer of confidential information.

The much touted Wi-Fi the next generation of internet connectivity did not take off. Instead it got bogged down with issues of security mainly in the application layer protocols. The flaws in POP, FTP , HTTP were there but eavesdropping on a wired network was more difficult when compared to a wireless network.

Most of the data on the internet was sent in plain text. Wireless network security was under threat with wireless network sniffer and ip port scanners. Wifi sniffers and war driving soon exposed the innumerable wireless devices. Then only few transmissions were encrypted. Encryption and authentication techniques have added some teeth to the lax security that existed on the wireless. WEP was implemented to enable privacy but then wep sniffers also were introduced. Then WPA and WPA2 have since improved wireless home network security and laptop computer security . Still a lot of issues remain unresolved. We shall discuss some of them below

Wireless networks security concerns

Wireless network security has become important due to tele-workers and mobile phones being used to access networks. The number of devices has increased and so has wireless network security software. Wireless sniffers and other Wi-fi sniffers only highlight the point that wireless security needs to be improved more.

• Access control attacks are means of penetrating any network that has wireless connectivity by evading WLAN access control measures (AP MAC filters, 802.1X port access control). This is done by listening beacons or by sending probe requests.
• Software like DStumbler, KisMAC, MacStumbler, NetStumbler or WaveStumbler are used to launch a war driving attack.
• 802.1X RADIUS cracking is done by a brute force attack or by a packet capture tool on the network path between the Access point and the RADIUS server. Thus the network can be taken over by an evil twin Access Point.
• Reconfiguration of the MAC address using tools such as Bwmachak, changemac.sh, SirMACsAlot, SMAC, Wellenreiter, or wicontrol. This makes the rouge Access Points or stations appear authorized in the network. This is called MAC spoofing.
• Creating a backdoor and installing an unsecured AP inside the firewall thus creating a rouge access point.
• Connecting directly to an unsecured access point like wireless card or USB adapter.
• WEP-(Wireless Encryption privacy) Key cracking. These are usually achieved through Man in the middle attacks or through phishing.
• Denial of service is achieved through capturing 802.1X EAP(Extensible Authentication protocol) or RADIUS.
• Frame injection, RF jamming, beacon flood or CSMA/CA (clear Channel Assessment) is also exploited to make the channel appear busy for the Denial of Service Attack.

Continue to : Wireless Network Security and Cell phones

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