Ban of WEP & TKIP
Wi-Fi Alliance has (finally) decided to take some giant steps in improving the state of wireless security. Starting Jan 2011, TKIP will be disallowed on new APs and from 2012, it will be disallowed on all Wi-Fi devices. Come Jan 2013, WEP will not be allowed on new APs and from 2014, WEP will be disallowed on all Wi-Fi devices. This is the good news. But, let us also get to the “bad” news.
Last week we saw Google facing legal tangles for “accidental interception” of WiFi signals and this week it was Apple facing “mysterious disappearance” of WiFi signals during iPhone-4 demo at WWDC keynote. So “what’s going on”, does WiFi not like us any more? Well, because these things struck Eric and Steve, we got to hear about them, but in fact they strike Tom, Dick and Harry everyday.
But there is a way out of this WiFi chaos. Read more…
The WiFi snooping row Google has gotten itself into seems to be far from over. In April, Google revealed that its Street View cars had been collecting basic data such as the MAC addresses and SSIDs of WiFi networks in the vicinity. But after German authorities asked Google to audit the data, it admitted to have been “mistakenly” snooping payload data from Open WiFi networks. Apparently, a piece of WiFi data analysis code, written by Google engineers back in 2006, was part of the software used by the Street View cars, in turn leading to the WiFi snooping (of about 600 GB of data across 30 countries!). Read more…
