Hot answers tagged wifi
11
The question (to most people) is an oxymoron. By definition, people will think that "open WiFi" means "un-encrypted WiFi. To me you seem to be asking "Why did the people that wrote the 802.11 standard way back in 1997 make the decisions that they did?"
The short answer - we can only find out by asking them (or seeing if there are any discussion documents ...
9
Firesheep has nothing to do with the WiFi encryption. If you and I were both on an encrypted WiFi connection, I would still be able to Firesheep your data.
What Firesheep does happens at the router level. It does not intercept the waves on air (well, not exactly)
Basically, it runs an ARP spoofing attack. This sort of attack can be run on a LAN network as ...
8
The PSK variants of WPA and WPA2 uses a 256-bit key derived from a password for authentication.
The Enterprise variants of WPA and WPA2, also known as 802.1x uses a RADIUS server for authentication purposes. Authentication is achieved using variants of the EAP protocol. This is a more complex but more secure setup.
The key difference between WPA and WPA2 ...
5
WPA2 is more secure than WPA as explained by Terry. You just need to understand the difference between personal (pre shared key) and enterprise versions of both the protocols.
The personal version is where all the users share a secret password that is configured in the access point. In the enterprise version there is a central authentication server and all ...
4
The other answers have already explained that Firesheep-style attacks (basically MitM trhough ARP spoofing) have nothing to do with WiFi itself. This is a link-layer issue.
As for why open WiFi networks don't have encryption. Well, they just don't. I don't really know why they decided not to, I can only speculate. One very obvious reason is MitM attacks, as ...
2
You're correct that they are not the same problem: Password authentication and symmetric encryption are fully independent concepts that can each be implemented without the other. However, a password is one of several ways to produce the key necessary to operate the encryption.
An encrypted connection such as that between your computer and your AP is ...
2
When you are talking about "no password" and "same password," I imagine you are referring to the pre-shared key. This is not actually a password, but used as a known value by the station and AP to generate and securely (at least from outside sources without the known value) exchange keying material for the encrypted traffic. WPA/WPA2-Personal do not ...
1
Say you have 10 users.
In PSK mode all 10 users are using the same passphrase to generate the same key. Therefore, the likelyhood of capturing traffic and analyzing it to find the key is higher with so much traffic, and that key will be good until all 10 users agree to change the passphrase (and therefore the key)
If those same 10 users use their own ...
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