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Raistlin · 11-01-2009, 21:15

Falsehood #1: Hiding the SSID increases security.

It doesn't. When your laptop looks for wireless access points in the area it will send out a small beacon, basically a transmission that says "If you're a wireless access point tell me your name". If you hide your SSID your access point won't respond to this beacon.

Anybody that's interested at all in knowing what access points are really around them will use a programme like Netstumbler. What this does is to send a beacon similar to the one in the last example, except this beacon says "Hello wireless access point, your name is X." To which any wireless access point (regardless of whether its SSID is hidden or not) will respond with "No, I'm not X, I'm Y" with Y being whatever the true SSID is.

Falsehood #2: Turning on MAC address filtering increases security.

It doesn't. MAC address spoofing (the act of changing your MAC address to match that of another device) is trivially simply, expecially within a Linux environment, and is one of the first things that an attacker will do to gain access to your wireless network.

The scanning tools used to identify your network, capture packets from it, and from that break your encryption key, will tell the attacker what MAC addresses are being used by legitimate clients on your network - all he/she has to do is change their MAC address to match one of those and they're in.

11-01-2009, 21:15	#6
Raistlin Inactive Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Services: Depends on the person and the price they're offering Posts: 12,384	Re: settings on router Falsehood #1: Hiding the SSID increases security. It doesn't. When your laptop looks for wireless access points in the area it will send out a small beacon, basically a transmission that says "If you're a wireless access point tell me your name". If you hide your SSID your access point won't respond to this beacon. Anybody that's interested at all in knowing what access points are really around them will use a programme like Netstumbler. What this does is to send a beacon similar to the one in the last example, except this beacon says "Hello wireless access point, your name is X." To which any wireless access point (regardless of whether its SSID is hidden or not) will respond with "No, I'm not X, I'm Y" with Y being whatever the true SSID is. Falsehood #2: Turning on MAC address filtering increases security. It doesn't. MAC address spoofing (the act of changing your MAC address to match that of another device) is trivially simply, expecially within a Linux environment, and is one of the first things that an attacker will do to gain access to your wireless network. The scanning tools used to identify your network, capture packets from it, and from that break your encryption key, will tell the attacker what MAC addresses are being used by legitimate clients on your network - all he/she has to do is change their MAC address to match one of those and they're in.