I've gotten some good deals of my wireless devices, including wireless router, 802.11b PCMCIA, and USB adapters, from some stores around my neighborhood and some online computer outlet stores. Very surprisingly, I have connected to 3 different stations right after I installed the devices, which brought me into my some cable routers around my house and shared their bandwidth. As I called myself as a newbie to this wireless network, I've found it very insteresting and have even tried to crack into the routers to know what is exactly going on.

Two of them are using wireless router which connects to their cable modem and one of them is using wireless access point. For sure, they have no Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption turned on and no specific profile or network name specified. Hence, if you have a wireless device installed in your home, you can always get those stations in-between 100 to 300 (outdoor) fts by putting network type to intrastructure, disable WEP, and everything set to default. You just need a little bit networking knowledge to "steal" their bandwidth.

Default gateway is normally set to 192.168.0.1. By avoilding ip listed in DHCP table, you can assign your own ip address as long it belongs to the private network (192.168.*). After I got connected with their wireless devices, I opened my browser and tried to log in because I know it must be a web based administrative control panel. Nevertheless, I've been blocked with a password prompt (.htaccess). I have the product name and I went to the website to read the documentation and tried with the default password. Oh god, I got it his or her router. I can tell you, if someone gets into your server or router, END GAMES.!

There are good firewalls out there to prevend your system being hacked from external, but most of us (home users) don't really concern internal hacking.

WEP is not matured enough. WEP uses the RC4 encryption algorithm, which is known as a stream cipher. A stream cipher operates by expanding a short key into an infinite pseudo-random key stream. The sender XORs the key stream with the plaintext to produce ciphertext. The receiver has a copy of the same key, and uses it to generate identical key stream. XORing the key stream with the ciphertext yields the original plaintext. This mode of operation makes stream ciphers vulnerable to several security attacks.

As a newbie, I don't really understand how the whole system works and how it response to the internet. I've thought about this for a few days and come out with my own philosophy of my home wireless network. I throw my router away, return to the store, or resell it in ebay. I've had to build a system (win2k server) because SuSE and Redhat haven't supported those wireless devices yet. I'll close every unnecessery port, as well as DHCP. For sure, I'll turn on WEP?(128bits) and specific profiles. Moreover, I've to install a firewall that blocks all the incoming and outgoing TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc, and then set the internal ip address which I'll assign to my clients, according to their MAC addresses (physical address). If I have 3 clients, I'd only turn on 3 ips. The firewall will enforce every client to go through a passphrase whenever the system is disconnected from the network or reboot.

After making sure every client's computer is working, I'd have to build a internal proxy with different user id and password?and give them?different priviledge and make my server invisible from the network.

I wish it could be a good starting of learning 802.1 family. And of course, I wish this article would help some newbies setting up their wireless LANs. For more information, please contact me at eric@linuxmax.net.

Good Luck.