Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 12:48:07 -0800 From: Nick Sayer <nsayer@sftw.com> To: Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> Cc: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: using WaveLAN with Apple Airport base station Message-ID: <3A032487.BFB97E79@sftw.com> References: <a0em0trqt0.fsf@panix6.panix.com>
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Mark Evenson wrote:
> [...]
>
> Are Gold cards (what is in the laptop) fundamentally unable to talk to
> Silver cards (what the both the Airport base station and card are)?
No, gold cards are backwards-compatible with silver cards when they are
given a "short" (40 bit) key.
Note that one way you can arrive on a common key is to specify a literal
key on the Apple side. Using the key $nnnnnnnnnn (where each n is
[0-9a-f]) as the "network password" on the Apple side sets the same key
as wicontrol -i wi0 -k 0xnnnnnnnnnn (with all the ns being the same key,
obviously). You can also use a 5 character ASCII string literally by
double quoting it ("mykey"), however it is extremely bad practice to do
other than get your encryption key straight from /dev/random, IMHO (and
change it weekly -- the sequence number used to preterb the encryption
in WEP is only 24 bits long, which makes it possible to run the whole
sequence in a relatively short period of time. An attacker with a lot of
patience could generate your LAN's complete "codebook" and thus not even
have to know your key).
Another BTW: I got a tip at BSDcon that allows one to enable built-in
Airport cards under the OS X beta. The cards are forced to be in IBSS
mode with no encryption, but that's a lot better than nothing. It's
off-topic here, but e-mail me if you want it.
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