Questions about 802.11i

[Insomniac]

I have been wanting to set up a wireless network in my house so I can use my laptop out on the deck. Especially now that the weather is getting nicer.

Right now, 802.11b is the most popular and cost-friendly solution. Unfortunately, it was demonstrated a year ago that WEP was a very weak security option. It has been broken, just no in theory, but in practice as well. To resolve this, The Task Group I of the IEEE committee are currently working on a fix to the security flaws in WEP. This standard is currently being prepared and should be ready this year.

So, I'm wondering, will 802.11b devices be upgradable to these fixes? They did add 128-bit encryption after the fact to many devices. I am guessing since the new standard is supposed to be fast it may be able to use newer hardware to generate keys. But could 802.11b devices still do this, but maybe just slower?

I have an unrelated question. Are the Linksys Wireless Routers capable of MAC address filtering? Would that only be applied to clients trying to access the AP?

 

[spyordie007]

If security is a big issue rather than worry about a new more secure standard you could just setup a VPN over the wireless connection.

I got my wireless networking up and running today so I'm browsing through all the wireless forums, I however have it just setup for the internet connection so I dont have any security running at all, just TCP/IP on the wirless interface of my server and my laptop and no DCHP server. If someone wanted to connect to my network they would first have to figure out the right channel (which would be the easy part), than find out the IP address of the server (which is a slightly less common private IP) than figure out which IP on the network was my server (as opposed to the IP of the laptop) and the worst thing they could do would be to use my internet connection...

If I ever decide that I want to setup file/print sharing between my laptop and the rest of the network I will probably just setup some kind of VPN on the server and connect to that, that way I dont have to enable WEP, and as I understand your performance takes a big hit if you enable WEP.

-Spy

 

[Insomniac]

My biggest issue would be keeping others off my network. For that, MAC adddress filtering should be good enough. (I'm not sure if you can fake MAC addresses). If someone really wants to park in my driveway and watch as well as decrypt packets, so be it. I'm not working on anything top secret. But, I will use WEP because that is still one more thing to get through, however easily. But, they are going to fix the problems with WEP. It sure would be nice to take advantage of those fixes without purchasing new wireless cards and APs. So I was hoping someone has a little insight on the matter.

I know about the 50% hit on throughput, but even then my broadband connection couldn't saturate the bandwidth. I just want to work outside on nice days.