Re: Wireless Disconnects

On Nov 23, 8:16 am, David Fairbrother <5k00l54...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


In a home security and personal privacy sense, though, keeping a little
bit of mystery about oneself is never a bad thing :)

I want to comment that you guys have done nothing to convince me of
the value of your SSID obscurity = increased security argument.

Let me summarize your argument and see how it looks. If I understand
it right, it goes:

1) I don't announce my name by SSID, therefore burglers (who approach
my home while wardriving, one must assume) can't case my house as
easily as they can for another potential victim who does use their
name as SSID.

2) These portable wifi equipped burglers will tend to choose the house
that announces it's name via wifi because, in their way of thinking,a
guy who announces his family name will have more valuable stuff or
easier to steal than the house next door which does not announce the
family name via wifi.

To me, this is a big stretch.

Related assumptions or statements given to support above theory:

1) Announcing your family name (via SSID) will make it easier for a
wifi-equipped burgler to know the length of your passphrase.

2) Length of wifi passphrase for home APs is considered by burglers
to be indicative of total fencable value of household items for given
house! Presumably the burgler's association has done studies
comparing the extractable value of household goods as a function of
wifi passphrase security and then published the conclusive results
along with (a yet to be presented) technique that allows your
sophisticated wifi equipped burgler to determine the passphrase length
for the various houses in a given neigborhood.

Or maybe cracking passphrase length (using family name as a wedge), as
well the antedotal evidence of higher value goods found in such
houses, is simply common knowledge on the street. After all, with
so many wifi-equipped/ wifi hacking home burglers running around these
days, such information would get around.

Excuse my sarcasm, could't resist ! Just trying to make my point,
though, not make anybody mad.

Here's what I think is really going on here; There are people who
just generally feel that hiding as much as possible helps protect them
from the dangers of the world. They are attracted to the idea and
live by it. I've got friends who are like that and I see that it's
not always tied to specific reasons, they just use this approach in
general. It suits them.

Personally, I don't like to live that way and only use the security
I'm convinced is necessary. Two different approaches to life, that's
all.

In this case, those who are proposing this idea that SSIDing your name
is risky are trying to justify their approach to life as being a
rational decision when it's simply a general approach that they are
into. Period. They don't like people to know anything more about
them than absolutely necessary. Period. That's how they feel and it
won't change.

Fine! To each his own. But when advising others, realize that you
are suggesting what makes you FEEL secure, nothing more. Side
effect; wireless networking is a bit more difficult in general to
troubleshoot when working around such people.

I see Jeff and John's (and other's) approach as being " we are here
on this forum trying to help things work better while advising people
on real, known vulnerabilities when using wireless internet. Your
average home user needs to know about how to avoid the known security
issues and not have that displaced by known ineffective methods such
as WEP, obscuring SSID, or using MAC filtering.

I hope this is not offensive or threatening, Mark. Appreciate your
presence and experience as always!

Cheers,
Steve
.

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