Reports from early adopters of pre-n routers like the Belkin are positive.
The basic idea of using antenna arrays to form directional antennas is not new - we had them back in CB days, and we didn't even have a sophisticated base unit, just a garden variety cottage setup for emergencies (back when you couldn't get phone service at our cottage). At that time, I think there was a gang switch that set direction, so it was definitely manual. I think back in the earlier days of short wave radio, a lot of broadcasters used antenna arrays to beam their signal to a specific country (no point in sending an italian language broadcast somewhere where they don't speak italian) but that was probably manual too. So the underlying principals are well-known and well understood. The nice thing about antenna array technology is that there is already an improvement if only one end uses it. Both ends are nicer, of course, but it's hard to imagine an antenna array perched behind your laptop. The router can memorize where each MAC is geographically and set the antenna array up for each send to that MAC. I don't know what it could do about receive, though, other than measuring the direction for the next send. There isn't much time once you see the packet is coming to reset the antenna configuration. And if you miss the header because you were listening in the wrong direction, it's gone. Here's an interesting wiki article on 802.11n http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#802.11n I'm not sure about some of the dates, though. For an interesting description of building a WEP-attacking tool and the research they did, see: http://ftp.die.net/mirror/papers/802.11/wep_attack.pdf It's light on crytanalysis compared to the theoretical paper it references, but it's still not the easiest read. Basically, there is enough regularity in the first few bytes of most network traffic that a moderately sophisticated guesser program can guess the WEP encryption keys, work backwards and read your traffic. Additionally, given 2 implementation flaws that many WEP implementations have, both related to key choice, the guessing time can be quite short. These are implementation errors, not errors in the standard, but even without them, WEP is breakable. An average of 4 million transactions would be needed, in theory to break any encryption key. It sounds like a big number, but if I didn't mess up the math, it's something like 300 songs played on your squeezebox. The paper recommends putting your WAP outside your firewall, something I'm strongly considering. -- Michaelwagner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michaelwagner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23134 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
