Chapter 10. Wireless Security
“Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?”
—Comedian George Carlin
By the end of this chapter, you should know and be able to explain the following:
• The essentials of wireless LANs, including their benefits and risks
• The major threats to a wireless network
• How to secure a wireless network
• The breadth and scope of possible attacks and exploits available to attackers
Answering these key questions will enable you to understand the overall characteristics and importance of network security within the wireless networking space. By the time you finish this book, you will have a solid appreciation for network security, its issues, how it works, and why it is important.
When was the last time you went on vacation to get away from it all? Perhaps to some remote beach or maybe a getaway to the country? Imagine that you walk out the patio door of your hotel room (an ocean view, of course) and admire the beauty of the sun setting on the ocean. The air is cool, so you decide to sit on the porch in your favorite lounge chair; the seagulls are playing, the waves are breaking in a rhythmic beat, and beep-beep-beep—your iPhone begins to go off!
Who could possibly be paging you while you are trying to relax and unplug? What emergency could be so grave that it would require you to be interrupted on this fantasy vacation?
According to the message on the display, there seems to be a problem with the company’s mission-critical firewall/VPN/Exchange server/<insert emergency here>. It looks serious, so you conclude that you need to log in to your office network and take a look.
It is a good thing you chose a hotel with “free” high-speed wireless Internet access. You cannot avoid turning on the laptop that you were not planning to turn on while you were on vacation; you are needed for an emergency.
So, here you are on the patio of your suite (why not a suite? it’s my story!) booting up your laptop and explaining to your wife that it won’t take long. You see the “blinky-blinky” of the wireless NIC’s status lights, you just need to log in. All systems are go!
You fire up Telnet and proceed to log in to the router/firewall and start snooping around to see what the problem could be. This should not take too long, you say to yourself and to your wife. There is still plenty of time to enjoy the rest of the evening and perhaps have a nice dinner. An hour goes by and you have solved the problem. You are quite taken with yourself for being ingenious enough to diagnose and resolve the situation within a few tick-tocks.
Screeeech...stop the movie for a second. Unknowingly, the “vacationing uber tech” just caused his company to lose millions of dollars. How, you might ask, did this dashing guy in the movie cause millions of dollars to be lost just by logging in to his company’s router/firewall to fix a problem?
It was not the act of connecting to the router/firewall that caused the problem; it was the fact that he used a wireless connection. You see, the company that uber tech worked for (yes, past tense because he no longer works for them as a result) is a multinational corporation that was about to announce the creation of a new widget that was capable of converting discarded pizza boxes into something truly spectacular we are legally unable to disclose; a competitor of this revolutionary company not only wanted to stop this announcement—but they also wanted a copy of the plans for this widget so they could bring it to market first.
It seems that a hacker employed by the competitor was paid to follow vacationing uber tech and, at a convenient moment, download the contents of his laptop, in hopes that the hacker could find some proprietary information about the widget. Upon “seeing” uber tech boot up his laptop, complete with wireless NIC, the hacker realized that he had struck gold and decided to do some long-distance sniffing and hacking, courtesy of uber tech’s unsecured wireless connection. Long-distance sniffing and hacking—sounds like a script from “Mission: Impossible,” doesn’t it? Too far fetched to actually happen? The truth is that this type of scenario occurs on a daily basis. Bad guys with wireless-enabled laptops steal information right out of the air with little effort. They use tools that are readily available on the Internet and can cause many problems for companies that do not take the time to understand the threats an unsecured wireless connection poses to their corporate network.
This chapter covers several topics related to wireless networking security and helps you identify, understand, and prevent the types of intrusions to which wireless connections are vulnerable from the outside. This chapter focuses on available commercial wireless products and not the home user versions from Cisco subsidiaries such as Linksys. However, do not ignore the advice and suggestions given here when setting up your wireless at home.