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mikegahan

As well as the useful tips above another trick to improve your computer security is to use a browser other than Internet Explorer. Try Firefox or Opera which are inherently more secure than IE and faster too. Firefoc in particular has a multiplicity of add ons that improve security even more.

You could also use a computer with Linux rather than Windows as the operating system or a mac but that is getting expensive!

SplanK

superscaper wrote: »

That'd sound almost plausible if it was WEP. But WPA-AES with a strong password???

yes... WPA has been broken and can be done quite quickly now - not as quick as WEP... but quicker than before

SplanK

WPA2 is not compatible with all devices

espresso

SplanK wrote: »

yes... WPA has been broken and can be done quite quickly now - not as quick as WEP... but quicker than before

Can you provide any proof of this? How quickly?

SplanK

espresso wrote: »

Can you provide any proof of this? How quickly?

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/wpa-cracked.ars
http://security.itproportal.com/articles/2008/11/07/wpa-encryption-broken-15-minutes-researchers/
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21552/53/

espresso

SplanK wrote: »

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/wpa-cracked.ars

Interesting article but not what you said:

SplanK wrote: »

yes... WPA has been broken and can be done quite quickly now - not as quick as WEP... but quicker than before

Quoted from the article:

The extraction only works in one direction, too: because it doesn't reveal the TKIP key or any other keys in use, only packets that appear to be sent from an AP to a client can be injected.

If a network uses AES, it's immune to this attack, and many corporate and high-security networks settled on AES when it became feasible a couple of years ago in order to avoid any lingering problems with TKIP that might eventually rear their heads.

Tews said that the basics of network security are still valid, too: for WPA with TKIP or AES, choosing a long network key, perhaps 20 characters that are relatively random, can defeat all known brute-force key cracking methods.

So WPA isn't broken, it turns out, and TKIP remains mostly intact.

Anyone using a 63 random character key and WPA encryption is still safe!

superscaper

SplanK wrote: »

yes... WPA has been broken and can be done quite quickly now - not as quick as WEP... but quicker than before

That's a generalisition, AFAIK WPA-AES has not been broken. You're probably thinking of TKIP but I didn't mention TKIP.

superscaper

Leopard wrote: »

Superscaper,



I enjoy your postings and I agree with much that you advance (always courteously and on many threads) but I think that that particular generalisation is going a little too far.

For a start, a well set up 802.11n wireless network running on 5 GHz is substantially faster than 10/100 wired Ethernet and a great many computers out there (including netbooks and the MacBook Air) have only 10/100 cards - not Gigabit.

I admit it was an unfair generalisation on my part. As you say not everyone has gigabit cards, but equally not everyone has n wireless. I think if you're comparing technologies then it's best to compare their equivalents in terms of generation, e.g. wireless n with ethernet cat 6. Otherwise I could also argue that wireless b is far slower than gigabit.

But your general point is right and I definitely concede to that, one is not better than the other, they're just better in some ways depending on individual circumstance and requirements.