jonheal;182579 Wrote: > Being pretty much an idiot when it comes to networking stuff, please > clarify something for me: > > As I understand it, encrypting your wireless broadcasts (hopefully) > prevents an eavesdropper from reading the packets you send out into the > atmosphere. Protecting the integrity of your network, and the machines > on it, is another matter entirely. Am I wrong in that assumption? And > if all your broadcasting is music packets, is it that big of a deal to > protect them?
I'm no more than a novice at this myself, but yes, this is something outside a normal LAN. If your machines are infected with various backdoors, it doesn't matter how secure your WPA2 passphrase is...although interestingly an attacker could still not find it out unless he was running a keylogger as you typed it in. But in regards to just broadcasting music packets and packets destined for an SB, you need to protect them even more because: - there will always be traffic an attacker could monitor - when broadcasting music, a steady stream of packets will be present to analyze As I understand it, these attacks work better when you have lots of packets to analyze. Once an attacker derives a passphrase, he can (at the very least) use your IP address for whatever purpose he wants. This includes child porn - there have been several high-profile busts recently where police are tracking offenders based on IP addresses, and you would have to prove your wireless network was compromised in court...meanwhile your name would be published in the local media. Once an attacker is on your LAN, he's also one step closer to accessing your hard drive contents. Your router won't stop him, it'll be up to software firewalls if he gets that far. Blocking by MAC address is useless here - he'll be able to see the MAC addresses of all the devices on your network and can clone one. -- Mark Lanctot "It's like, you know, a New Age religion, but with better treble response." - Jon Heal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32888 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
