[lug] OT: wiring a house for ethernet

[Nate Duehr]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 02:45:53PM -0600, Joshua Rubin wrote:
> I am surprised that I have only heard marginal discussion about wlan
> security!  It is simply insecure, even with WEP on.  WPA is good, but
> many, most, linux devices do not support it.  802.11i looks interesting
> though.  I use the prism54 (802.11g) card on my desktop and laptop, it
> is an AP on the desktop, and I use openvpn to build a secure tunnel. 
> With that, I am lucky to get over 1MB/s, not usable for true LAN.  I
> know it is a pain, but cat5\6 is not something I would ever give up.
> Joshua

True, but you'd have to park your car in front of my house for quite a
while to capture enough traffic to crack the WEP key.  I'll probably be
out with a large baseball bat wondering what you're doing in my driveway
for hours long before you have the key, and if not, I'm rarely doing
anything so private that I care... and that stuff that I do care about
I'm either on an SSH session, SSH tunnel, or using SSL in some fashion.

In other words, sure WEP is crackable, but someone can use WPA to rotate
things around, and if you put your antennas for the base station in
appropriate locations in your building structure you can minimize
exterior leakage of the RF to the immediate vicinity of the dwelling.
(Apartments and Condos are not going to apply here.)

Another possible "security by obscurity" would be to just purchase
802.11a ... fast, and virtually no interference with anything, and away
from the majority of wardrivers... ;-)

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>