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Re: Wireless Usage?

Purdue Univ. uses a Cisco VPN 3000 with a license for 5000 clients, which forces a login before access to anything is granted; this is tied in to Purdue's I2A2 authentication service. WEP is not secure enough (and the encryption slows down some cards), and maintaining a list of MAC addresses is just too time consuming. Besides, MAC addresses can be faked. I think there are many good reasons to be scared, starting with accountability (for negligence) if people launch attacks from your networks.

Of course, the main problem of Cisco VPNs from the point of view of mac users is that only MacOS X is supported. I think it's very short (or too long)-sighted of Cisco to do this. If you really want MacOS 9 VPNs that work with Cisco you can buy them from a third party (linked to from Cisco's web pages), but Purdue decided that it was too expensive <sniff, I love running OS 9 on my clamshell ibook!> or got the bait and switch maneuver with the now obsolete 5000 Cisco series which used to support OS 9 (I don't know which happened, maybe both).

If you're a conspiracy buff, you might think that WEP was designed knowing full-well that it was inadequate and that companies like Cisco would make money selling VPNs to remediate the manufacturing defect that is WEP. That is, WEP was designed so it would not compete with VPNs. Proof would be that people on the 802.11b committee publicly admitted knowing about most of the WEP vulnerabilities a year or so before they were found independently.

Cheers,
Pascal

At 1:35 PM -0400 9/24/02, Casey Bisson wrote:
Howdy,

We're using wireless in many locations here, but somebody just got scared about security. Until now we haven't been using WEP, nor have we cloaking the network name for wireless base stations that serve mobile classrooms on campus.

<long question> I'm wondering how wireless is being used on other campuses, how security concerns may play on that, and what the philosophy about security is? <abreviated question> Do you use WEP? Yes/no, why?

Thank you in advance,

Casey Bisson
__________________________________________

Systems Administrator & Library Systems Liaison
Plymouth State College
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
ph: 603-535-2948
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--
Pascal Meunier, Ph.D., M.Sc.
Assistant Research Scientist,
CERIAS
Purdue University
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References: 
 >Wireless Usage? (From: Casey Bisson <email@hidden>)



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