Henderson review how we did it

By Tom Henderson
Network World, 04/08/02

We installed the WG-1000 to our testing network, which included several Compaq Presario 700US notebooks, a Sony PCG ICX notebook, and an HP Pavilion desktop with various 802.11a and 802.11b cards from SMC, Agere/Orinoco, and Intel. We connected an Intel and Agere/Orinoco 802.11b access point, and an Intel and SMC 802.11a access point.

We then ran tests that included session hijacks on 802.11b cards, and man-in-the-middle crack attempts using WEPCrack and AirSnort to dictionary attack or XOR attack streams in an attempt to hijack sessions.

We were successful in our ability to hijack session that didn't use VPNs, but used access point-based WEP encryption. However, with Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (V1.1) or IPSec (Bluesocket or Windows 2000-based with Windows 2000 certificate authority), we couldn't hijack sessions.

Added security authentication to LDAP (via OpenLDAP 1.3 on SuSE Linux 7.3 hosted on a Gateway-brand server) worked, as did NTLM authentication against Windows 2000 Advanced Server (SP2, hosted on a Compaq ProLiant 3000 server). Guest account access, when enabled on the WG-1000 also worked correctly when focused directly at our internal firewall/NAT/gateway, although such sessions could be hijacked because they used no VPN software, and therefore the sessions were unprotected from a WEPCrack attack.

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