Real World Computing

What the various wireless kit vendors are trying to say by using this term is that their wireless devices are extra-secure when it comes to accepting conversations. However, this doesn't say anything at all about the usefulness of great streams of data captured from those conversations by freely participating listeners. As I understand the state of decryption technology these days, getting your information out of a stream of many megabytes of wireless traffic is pretty much automatic now. It's this fact that motivated those apparently sober conference delegates to take a punt on masquerading, spoofing, listening and collecting whatever might leak across the airways.

There's a whole raft of devices that take extra steps to handshake with approved wireless counterparties, but the list of manufacturers of wireless LAN detectors for the corporate network is somewhat shorter. WiMetrics (www.wimetrics.com) and AirDefense (www.airdefense.net/products/index.php) will help to solve the problem in part, and the usual suspects at 3Com and Cisco cover both approaches to this problem too, but to my mind it's the fundamental anonymity of wireless access that's at fault here. Until there's some usable method of spotting a rogue emitter - say, some kind of "James Bond Briefcase" device that can highlight all the Wi-Fi sources within the range of a webcam - it will become increasingly difficult to justify any corporate use of this technology at all. And if you wanted a final condemnation, consider the likely job descriptions and remuneration packages of these technical types thought important enough to send to a European conference, types who wasted no time in some cases in kicking off a round of wireless ping-pong.

And in case you're thinking that I'm imagining threats to the safety of my data while on the conference circuit, here's a morsel of food for thought: when I went back to my hotel suite and plugged into the nice, friendly, safe, efficient, wired hotel internet connection, I discovered that my internet browsing experience had changed somewhat. If I mistyped any URL, or took any other action that would normally produce a 404 error, then I would be magically transported to a vaguely related page of relevant search hits.

I know what you're thinking: at last silly old Cassidy has caught a virus! But no, because for one thing I was using my recently rehabilitated MacBook Pro, which is rather more immune to casual infection than a Windows machine, and for another thing, once the same machine was connected to a different network this strange behaviour ceased. What was actually happening was that the hotel had - unwittingly, I suspect - installed a transparent proxy, and whoever configured that proxy had felt inclined to make it a bit more intrusive than is commonly the case. Which is a polite way of saying that there's no way of telling how much other fiddling is going on in the stream of traffic there, other than by such sudden bizarre one-off behaviours from otherwise reliable systems. Which is why I wasn't at all surprised to have to ring the tech support line for one of my mail accounts because the mailbox complained that it was locked. Open. For the first time in nearly 15 years...

Continued....