How secure is nowaday Wireless Security (WEP and WPA)? How confident are you?

[ABAMOTO]

Dear all:
I believe many of you have Wireless Network available in your home / office. However, how secure is current technology towards wireless security? How confident are you?

I have heard with a P4, some program can crack 128 bit WEP in 3~4 hours. Many of my friends want to have wireless network but, no matter what I said to them, they are just so convinced that hackers (within the wi-fi range) can easily crack into their network even with WEP or WPA encryption.

In my house, I currently have WPA-PSK + locking MAC address. I feel this is so far one of the most secure ways for wireless network security (Of course I can change password periodically from a WPA RADIUS server, but that is just too expensive and non realistic). Do you think my current setup is secure enough?

If my company applies this setup, would it be secure enough for my company, just in case if anyone enters the Wi-Fi range).

Thanks =)

 

[Phantasm66]

http://www.wardriving.com/



Hehehe, you should see the number of people who don't even put encryption on at all. I can put my laptop right at my window, and because I live at the corner of what Americans would call a block, I can pickup about 2-3 wireless broadband connections being shared usually. That's through air and two lots of glass. So stop and think about that for a start.

If you have any other questions about the encryption, http://www.wardriving.com/ should answer them, I guess.

http://www.wardriving.com/doc/Wardriving-HOWTO.txt

 

[zephead]

what does your comany do? more specifically, what kind and how confidential information would be out on said network? is your location in close proximity with other buildings/people? these are some of the first things that must be evaluated before making the next decision.

 

[ABAMOTO]

zephead:
My company is in retail. Basically our most confidential data would probably be the pricing and product detailed specs for internal engineers' referece.

I am much more concerned of data integrity and corruption caused by outside access. Our location is in a business plaza so we do have other buildings / companies located surrounded. However, so far it has been almost 6 months and I did not detect any unauthorized access.

I think WPA + MAC Address filtering should be secure enough. AFter all, we are not NASA or some government agency that are always targertted for attack.

 

[zephead]

it all somes down to your decision. sounds like it'll be fine.