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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings
Thus spake "Sean Donelan" <[email protected]> > The wireless networks at NANOG meetings never follow what the security > professionals say are mandatory, essential security practices. The NANOG > wireless network doesn't use any authentication, enables broadcast SSID, > has a trivial to guess SSID, doesn't use WEP, doesn't have any perimeter > firewalls, etc, etc, etc. At the last NANOG meeting IIRC over 400 > stations were active on the network. There is no useful security mechanism that can be applied to NANOG wireless. WEP assumes a black-and-white security model, just like most VPNs: if a user is on the "inside", they're fully trusted. This is somewhat reasonable in the corporate world, where all of the users are employees who are responsible to a common entity, but it has no application to NANOG or other public events where none of the users are responsible to the operator, much less have any trust for each other. There is no sense giving people the illusion of security here. Many corporations are going to open access-points "outside" their firewall and requiring per-user VPNs to access any data-center resources. This is the simplest (and cheapest) solution to deploy and offers security folks the best options for AAA besides. I can't say without a sniffer, but I'd bet that most NANOG participants are doing the same: SSH or IPsec VPN's back to home (wherever that is). Anyone who isn't is begging to be hacked, WEP or not. Anyone interested in hacking NANOG attendees' networks is likely a NANOG attendee himself. Caveat attendor. S
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