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| Information Security This Week (EU-IST) | ||
| Published | 28 November 2005 | |
| Editor | Urs. E. Gattiker | |
| ISSN | 1600-1869 | |
| Related Links |
Drinking your cafe latte at your favorite coffee lounge Keeping wi-fi connections safe from hackers |
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| Free Security Tool - CyTRAP's Choice - wireless security - beyond WEP and WPA | ||
| Increasingly, user's use their wireless technology to surf at the coffee shop around the corner or their favorite airport lounge. Unfortunately, when one dives into the matter, users discover how insecure shared computers or public wireless networks are. Need convincing, check this out. Just spend 2 minutes, register for free and run through the exercise, you'll be glad you did :-) |
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| WEP will stop a casual user, but freely available programs like AirSnort enable a malicious user to access a user's WLAN without too much difficult and neither is the risk reduced much by improving your WEP key's length. WPA encryption protects your data while it travels from your notebook to the hotspot. Unfortunately, once it arrives there it all depends upon how secure the hotspot is intself, if it is corrupted your data are not secure. It is that simple. |
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| So what is one supposed to do? Well if you have a corporate computer, check what program is being used for getting onto a public hotspot at your favorite airport lounge. If you can install programs on your computer, put this one on, register and off you go. If you run your own server, you have the opportunity to set up your own secure Internet endpoint. Instead of having the Pig client send all data to the software provider's secure connection servers, you can set up your own secure connection servers. Just like the iPig client, the iPig Server is extremly easy to install. All you need is a PC or Server with a permanet Internet connection (of course, corporate clients can by a fancy version...). |
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| FACTS Cost: Freeware Software: iPig Wifi Security Software V1.02 Release Date: 2003 Platforms: Windows 2000, XP or 2003 - Works with EVERY WLAN/WIFI/LAN card and every wired Internet connections - Compatible with ALL Internet software and firewall software Author: iOpus GmbH Language: English, German etc. Size of Download: 559 KB TIDBIT iOpus iPig uses the Blowfish encryption algorithm. TIDBIT 2 The advantage with iPig freeware is that while your data pass through the hotspot, they remain encrpyted. Hence, neither a man-in-the-middle attack nor a 'twin' attack will compromise your data's security. See also related story for a software that encrypts e-mail attachments, nice and easy using a small software application whereby the recipient does not have to install anything...just put in the password provided over the phone and the file can be accessed. |
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