The PhoneBoy Blog


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Securing WiFi

I now remember why I shut down my Wifi — it’s a pain in the ass to secure properly, at least with most consumer-grade equipment. I have two particular Access Points, a Nexland WaveBase, which has almost no security in it (just WEP), and a Nokia A032, which was actually meant as a corporate-type access point, except the management interface leaves a lot to be desired. It does do WEP (both Nokia’s version and standard WiFi WEP) and does MAC filtering.

One of the things about WEP, which stands for Wireless Encryption Protocol is: your “encryption key” is basically guessable due to a fundamental design flaw in WEP. Anyone sniffing the traffic can gather enough traffic to basically “brute force” your encryption key. Since it’s fairly straightforward to sniff a WiFi connection and it’s not like I can do anything like erect a wall to prevent it, it basically means anyone with the desire to utilize my WiFi access point can do so fairly easily. To ensure that all anyone can use is my Internet connection, I’ve placed my WiFi access point behind a seperate router which has it’s own Internet connection. All they can mess with is my router, big whooping deal.

There’s a bunch of other things you’re supposed to do like turn off the access point broadcasts so other people can’t find you and choose a non-default SSID. I’ve done the latter, but I can’t figure out how to make the A032 stop sending broadcasts. Oh well, as I said, nothing on the WiFi subnet anyway.


#Cybersecurity Evangelist, Podcaster, #noagenda Producer, Frequenter of shiny metal tubes, Expressor of personal opinions, and of course, a coffee achiever.