Welcome to the DARKSIDE ..

[Vu Pham]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 02:12 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 00:29 -0500, vu pham wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 13:02 -0500, Ben Duncan wrote:
> > > After putting it off for years, and since my College going son
> > > has bought a laptop for his graphic artist courses, I went to
> > > Best buy and bought my wife one of those $499 Gateway laptops.
> > > Fairly Decent machine - AMD ML32 64 bit processor, but has
> > > Windows XP home on it. My son's has XP Media edition, so
> > > now I have let 2 MicroSoft computers' into my HOUSE of Linux ...
> > > 
> > > Anyway, what turned out interesting was last night found 12 -
> > > count 'em - 12 Wireless networks from my kitchen table.
> > > 2 were TOTALLY unsecured, the rest were reported to be secured,
> > > but used WEP key with the 5 digit key - and all were
> > > easily cracked . Example: SSID of EAST1234 and it's password
> > > was EAST1 .... ANd most of them had the workgroup  as ...
> > > You guessed it .. WORKGROUP or MSHOME ...
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Sheessss'.... will Winsloth Luser's ever learn ?
> > > 
> > 
> > It is late now so my brain works not very well. Does wireless security
> > have anything to do with Windows or Linux or any Os ?
> 
> Sure! Same as ethernet security, email spam assassin, any type of
> intrusion alerting software since UNIX / Linux is all about networking,
> *if nothing else*. Has been for over 30 years. Why bother to have file
> permissions if not? Why have all that crap in /etc ? It's pretty much
> all about multi-tasking multi-user networking and security. What did you
> think Linux or any OS that networks should be about? 
> 
> Even as a gaming platform it has to have file security set for the files
> to run at all as a single user and network persmissions for multi-player
> mode. Security then, is an issue, to answer your question IMHO. :) Ric
> 

I think wireless/wired security is separated from OS security, and these
two, besides other factors like human being, make "secured systems" :
secured OS + secured media + secured social environment.

Regarding security over communication, all OSes so far are designed to
live with the Ethernet which is already open in the meaning that the
Ethernet packets are unencrypted and anybody who can tap into the wire
then he/she may looks inside those packets. That's why we have encrypted
communication protocols like ssh. 

Wireless is also a open communication media, and IMHO, it is just a
little bit more open than the wire.

So if Linux is considered secured over the Ethernet , then will it be
considered un-secured over the WIFI without encryption or with weak
encryption like WEP ?

My point is the secured wireless protocols help the whole system more
secured, not the OSes themselves. 


Vu