From owner-freebsd-mobile Fri Nov 3 12:48:20 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from guardian.sftw.com (guardian.sftw.com [209.157.37.25]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4AB9B37B4CF for ; Fri, 3 Nov 2000 12:48:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from yoda.sftw.com (yoda.sftw.com [209.157.37.211]) by guardian.sftw.com (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id eA3KmGq39107; Fri, 3 Nov 2000 12:48:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nsayer@sftw.com) Received: from sftw.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by yoda.sftw.com (8.11.0/8.11.0) with ESMTP id eA3Km7q16873; Fri, 3 Nov 2000 12:48:08 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nsayer@sftw.com) Message-ID: <3A032487.BFB97E79@sftw.com> Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 12:48:07 -0800 From: Nick Sayer Reply-To: nsayer@freebsd.org X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mark Evenson Cc: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: using WaveLAN with Apple Airport base station References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message