They say that the Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol has been cracked. What's a wireless user to do? Tunnel. Secure Shell (SSH) is open, free, fast, secure, and easy to setup (once you know how). WEP has never provided much more than . . .
They say that the Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol has been cracked. What's a wireless user to do? Tunnel. Secure Shell (SSH) is open, free, fast, secure, and easy to setup (once you know how). WEP has never provided much more than a form of access control to your wireless nodes. With a shared private key, everyone participating in your network has the potential to eavesdrop on everyone else. You can try it for yourself; run tcpdump on your laptop, and watch the traffic going through your access point just fly by! Passwords, private e-mails, web traffic, everything could potentially be logged and pored over later by anyone who can associate with your access point.

Plus, key management under 802.11b is difficult. Who wants to distribute a shared password, only to have to change it regularly (and revisit all of those clients who weren't adept enough to set it up themselves in the first place?) Some drivers try to cope with this by letting the user assign multiple keys and pick between them, but this just postpones the inevitable.