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How do you protect a wireless network, when used with a laptop.

and make it easy for me to understand.

no i am not asking for myself i am asking for another person.

so that means you should make it even eaiser to understand as it will be repeated
through the grapevine and that might make it be messed up?



Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27772

First off, enable 128Bit wep encryption. As far as I know it's just a checkbox and you have an option to make a key, so make something complicated - no words, just random letters and numbers.

Then enable mac address filtering, when you do an ipconfig on your machines you can get the mac address of the network card so add it in the the filter, anything but those won't be allowed access.

Given the possibilities of keys in 128bit encrypted keys, and the possibilities of mac addresses, it will be very hard to crack, unless some security flaw is found to bypass all the authentication. I have yet to hear of any such exploit but the possibility is still there. A wireless network will never be as secure as wired, but by today's standards, and for a home network, it's more then enough security if well configured.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27779

i had heard of something from broken . org that was hard to block but was not sure how to set up to protect against the hard stuff.

so i thought to ask for him to make sure he is secure.



Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27781

While Red's suggestions are admirable, (espescially the MAC address thing) here's some more key points and refinements to consider:


Go with WPA... there' s a flaw in WEP that allows it to be easily robbed of it's key using some free tools.

WPA should be availible on your wireless router, if not check and see if there's a firmware update availible on your manufacturer's website.

Another thing of almost utmost paramount importance is disabling SSID broadcast... you might have to configure your wireless clients manually but it will prevent your network from being seen by the outside world.

Last but not least, feel free to switch your network to an un-common channel and (of course) change the default password on your router.

Josh

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27789

Newer implementations of WEP don't suffer the problems of old.

You should do everything mentioned above and use SSL. Using a self signed cert will keep most snotty nosed wanna-bes from eavesdropping. Use a fake CA to protect anything important.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27807

Oh yeah I forgot the most important, changing the default admin password. If the router has an option to disable remote administration from the outside, disable it alltogether.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3442, old post ID:27808