Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 23:27:04 +0200 From: Jos Visser <josv@osp.nl> To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Wavelan 802.11 with encryption Message-ID: <391F1A28.41BC7F50@osp.nl> References: <391EF3DE.FA17A058@osp.nl> <E12r5Xj-0001Ux-00@roam.psg.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
WEP encryption (default with the Silver Wavelan card) supports a 64-bit key. That's strong enough for me. Anyone who's interested enough in my stuff to come over to my house, tap into the 802.11 traffic and feed it to a sufficiently strong computer to do a brute force attack on the 64 bit key has plenty of other (cheaper and easier) opportunities to retrieve whatever they want. Remember: a 64 bit key (given a sufficiently strong enough algorithm) means 2^64 = 18446744073709551616 possible keys. Given a computer that can try 100 billion keys per seconds, I would need approximately 184467440 seconds to search the entire keyspace. You'd expect to need to search only half the keyspace, so 92233720 seconds. At 3600 seconds per hour, this means 25620 hours, at 24 hours in a day, this means 1067 days, which is almost three years (roundoff errors due to the use of bc). Now, believe me, I would be willing to tell you almost everything dating from three years and further back... ++Jos Randy Bush wrote: > > > I set up a wireless network in my home using two Lucent WaveLan 802.11 > > wireless LAN cards, one of which sits in a FreeBSD 3.0 machine. It works > > like a charm. But now I want to set up encryption. As far as I can see, > > the current FreeBSD driver does not support encryption? > > WEP encryption is not sufficiently strong for real use. use end-to-end > ip encryption, e.g. ssh etc. > > randy -- Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift, that's why we call it 'present'. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?391F1A28.41BC7F50>