WLAN summary

Home: www.packetnexus.com

sum up from different papers and other various sources.
anonymous@segfault.net

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ftp://ftp.orinocowireless.com/pub/software/ORiNOCO/PC_Card/Firmwarelookup
warheac.net

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa/wireless.pdf
datatwirl.yi.org/wep-faq.html
http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.html

misc quotes from papers.
Later on a few comments by myself:
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Operating at 2.4GHz,

I've heard rumours that if you wander through Stockholm's business
district or through the Square Mile in London, if you're in promiscuous
mode you can pick up all sorts of transmissions and a large number of
DHCP servers offering IPs to anyone who gets the ESS ID right.
Hope this helps someone. Just be careful out there ;)

3) This is the biggie - the WEP authentication protocol relies on DNS
and is therefore prone to massive man-in-the-middle attacks. There is a
paper by Jesse Walker called "Wireless LANs Unsafe at Any Key Size; and
analysis of the WEP encapsulation" that I encourage everyone to read.

The
authentication methods supported by the current 802.11 standard are Open
System and Shared Key. The Shared Key method requires that the WEP
algorithm be implemented on both the wireless terminal and the access
point. In the Open System authentication scheme, which is the default
scheme, a terminal announces that it wishes to associate with an access
point, and typically the access point allows the association.

The user authentication in TWISS is based on public-key cryptography.
Each user has a public/private key pair, which is generated on the TWISS
server and then delivered to the user in a distribution file. The keys
in a distribution file are protected using a password that only the user
knows. The password is entered when logging locally to the TWISS client
in order to access the private key needed when logging on to the TWISS
server. As the user logs on to the TWISS server, the client and the
server negotiate a symmetric encryption/decryption key that is used for
data confidentiality during a single security connection.

If attacker cuts
down the power of the whole site, then all wired networks are usually
useless, but the wireless LANs can be used in the ad-hoc configuration
with laptops or other battery powered computers.

The data security is accomplished by a complex encryption technique know
as the Wired Equivalent Privacy Algorithm (WEP). WEP is based on
protecting the transmitted data over the RF medium using a 64-bit seed
key and the RC4 encryption algorithm. WEP, when enabled, only protects
the data packet information and does not protect the physical layer
header so that other stations on the network can listen to the control
data needed to manage the network. However, the other stations cannot
decrypt the data portions of the packet.

You can configure a wireless network to broadcast its name, or not. It's
probably wise not to broadcast, so that people are less likely to
accidentally discover it.

You can configure most wireless access points to
allow only certain MAC addresses (like Ethernet 802.11 uses MAC addresses).

a useful tool for win2k is wildpackets "airopeek" wireless sniffer.
it has just come out of beta, and the beta version only supports
the cisco 340 family NIC, due to modified NDIS drivers.
with this running on