Friday, October 02, 2009

Wifi security problems - Just paint!

This was just a question of time till a company would come out with it and here it is: A paint that stops radio-waves which are used for wireless Lan (WLAN/WIFI). The same goes for cell phone and other radio waves used in modern mobile devices. For the electrical engineers: The paint claims to block radio waves up to 100 GHZ. So what exactly does that mean? An additional layer of security that can be introduced, to prevent someone to access your wireless network. You can paint the outside facing walls of your home or office with this special paint and nobody can pickup the radio waves from inside anymore...that actually also means nobody can use a cordless phone anymore when outside the home. So you might want to reconsider the paint and configure your wireless access point/router to use WPA2, the latest security standard for wireless devices. Is it a 100% assurance that nobody can break into your wireless network? Unfortunately the answer is No. Attacks that use so called rainbow tables containing precomputed keys that are used for the encryption and authentication of the wireless traffic and devices are the latest attacks, besides the usual attacks that go after flawed implementations of the wireless protocol with certain vendors. Maybe the paint is not such a bad idea but keep in mind that windows cannot be painted...

Read more at: BBC News, Wikipedia - Rainbowtable

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