Tech Tip 115 - Securing Your Wireless Network

Posted by on 03/04 at 05:59 PM Permalink

A home wireless network is an easy and convenient way to share an Internet connection and other resources among the computers in your home. While a couple of people that I know leave their wireless networks available to anyone and everyone, most of us want to keep our home wireless networks private. If you’re looking at wireless home networking for the first time, you may want to review these previous Tech Tips on wireless networking.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2007/techtips-04mar07.htm
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    Posted by Bob Hollinger  on  03/04  at  05:51 PM

  1. Thanks!  This tech-tip distilled down a lot of web searching and ‘read me’ files to one page that is easy to understand.

    2. Posted by Robb Topolski  on  03/04  at  09:59 PM

  2. Good try on the article, but I’m afraid some of the information is no longer valid and a small part of it is flat-out wrong.

    However, it’s a great topic and very timely, as wireless routers have fallen in price such that they’re usually cheaper than wired routers!

    MAC addresses are always broadcast unencrypted, it does not improve the security of your wireless network to list them.  This is largely a gimmick that makes your router look “feature rich” while also being “more complex to configure.”

    Another gimmick is disabling the broadcast of your SSID.  All that does is simply replace your SSID with null characters—roughly the equivilent of hiding your house by removing the street numbers. People can still find and associate with your network. 

    With numerous freely available tools, WEP encryption is no longer any security.

    The router’s firewall provides no wireless security, because anyone who associates with the router is, by definition, behind it. 

    One item that you failed to mention is power.  Many devices give the user the ability to control the transmit output of the wireless router.  In many cases, reducing power by 50 percent does not impact the performance of any computer in the home/office, but it reduces the wireless “footprint” by more than two-thirds.  Suddenly, the neighbor geek leeching off of your network can’t find your network anymore!

    BUT THE GOOD NEWS is that WPA (and it’s stronger cousin WPA2) security has still never been broken in the wild and it obsoletes all of the above-mentioned features.  Unlike all of the above, WPA provides both encryption and authentication.  Make sure your security “key” is easy enough to remember but too hard to guess or randomly brute-force hack--and you’re all done!  No MAC filters, no SSID hiding, no worries about the neighbor kids. 

    I hope that helps.

    Robb Topolski
    2006 Microsoft MVP-Networking
    Wireless Expert, Network Security Expert

    3. Posted by Ana  on  03/06  at  08:40 PM

  3. Thank you so much for this tech tip. For a while i was asking advice on how to setup wireless network security but most techs or computer geeks were too full of themselves to actually take the time and show me. Instead they had a tendency of just taking my computer and setting it up themselves. In the end, i would never learn the difference between all these types of securities and end up lost in my own settings. This article gave me a chance to look into it and finally learn and set it up myself. Thanks again!

    4. Posted by Lloyd Showalter  on  03/10  at  05:27 PM

  4. It was good to read how to find the MAC address on a Mac.  Thanks for the inclusion.  So often I read the how to on a PeeCee and have to figure out the Mac on my own.  I guess the real beauty is that I can.  Again thats for making Apple a part of your Geek Tip.

    5. Posted by business security systems  on  01/23  at  01:23 AM

  5. One item that you failed to mention is power.  Many devices give the user the ability to control the transmit output of the wireless router.

    6. Posted by Sync Computers  on  02/07  at  01:54 PM

  6. Just thought i’d point out that using the mac address filtering technique to secure your network isn’t totally secure. This is because it’s possible to spoof you own mac address to be any adress you want. Also you might be wondering “Well how would someone know which MAC to use?” This is also possible by port sniffing the packets from a specific network and using tools to unencrypt the data revealing a computers mac address.

    7. Posted by south village project  on  02/23  at  09:29 AM

  7. On the PBS show Nature there was a show dedicated to Colony Collapse Disorder where there was mention of some blame on the phenomenon of missing bees particularly due to the wide use of cellphones as the cause of the collapse.

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