JillSwift

Recently I caught someone borrowing bandwidth from me. I blame myself, as I was using WEP. (An older laptop belonging to a roommate couldn't do WPA, and when she got a new machine with a modern OS I was just lazy about upping security.)

While tightening up security, I discovered my Linksys WAP54G was able to white-list MAC addresses, so I went ahead and made use of that feature for an added layer of security.

Question is: Could I safely get away with just the white-list, or aught I stick with the WPA2-Personal layer as well?

meton_magis

whitelists are just 1 more layer of security, and are probably the lowest on the list. It is VERY easy to crack that kind of security, since all you would have to do is sniff wireless trafic and capture a mac address. Then, when you're not using it, they can then assign that address to their card, and they have free bandwidth again.

If they were able to crack wep, then this method is trivial to perform. I've never cracked wep before, but I could crack a mac white-list in under 1 minute.

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echo "$whatever_youre_saying" > /dev/null

Segfault

Sniffing MAC addresses is a piece of cake, they are in plaintext. Changing them is even easier, see man ifconfig.
The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN | George Ou | ZDNet.com

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JillSwift

Oh duh. I should have thought of spoofing all on my own.

Ah well, it's in the willingness to ask the question that protects us from our own brain-fartage.

Thank y'all!