Technique

Is your Office Access Up in the Air?

Thanks to the advent of the 802.11b standard, wireless networking’s popularity has increased both in the office and at home. Adding a wireless access point to an office network can provide seamless connectivity for laptop road warriors. Mobility within the office is also desirable – when you need to reconfigure workstations you no longer need to work around existing wired network ports or pull additional wiring. While the speed of wireless is only a fraction of current wired networks, 802.11b provides more than enough throughput for office work and sharing broadband Internet connections.

The combination of convenience, ease of setup, reasonable speed and falling costs has created a boom in adoption of wireless networking. Much as in the early days of the Internet, people are jumping on board without proper consideration of network security. The most common wireless standard, 802.11b, contains a specification for encryption known as the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) algorithm. As wireless network signals are exposed in the open air, encryption is necessary to prevent “sniffing” of the signal by unauthorized individuals. Unfortunately, shortly after 802.11b’s release it became evident that the WEP algorithm was inherently flawed. Free programs, such as AirSnort and WEPCrack were created to illustrate the vulnerability of these new wireless networks.

This relative ease of intrusion coupled with the expanding presence of badly configured wireless access points, gave rise to the hacker “sport” known as war driving. Tooling around in a car, equipped with a laptop, wireless card and software, such as NetStumbler, detecting and infiltrating wireless networks. While most war driving is a relatively harmless attempt to find free Internet access, improper security can cause exposure of entire corporate networks via the wireless access point. Inexpensive, homebuilt antennas can also boost reception. Some claims have stated access to networks 25 miles away via line of sight from a hilltop.

While wireless networking offers many benefits, the access points should be located outside the corporate firewall, and only provide connections to the internal network via encrypted VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunneling.

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