Mathew Friedman over at networkingpipeline has and interesting take on some myths about networking security. This is good overview article, but he is suggesting that wireless isn't as insecure as I think it is.
4. Wireless networks are inherently insecure: Wireless networking gets a bad rap. The conventional wisdom holds that Wi-Fi is inherently less secure than wired networks because in its early days, [Justin Peltier, a senior security consultant with Peltier Associates] concedes, the Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) protocol had more security holes than Swiss cheese. The point, however, is that wireless security has gone far beyond WEP; users just have to enable these security features.
"Properly configures, wireless is actually much more secure than wired networking," he says. "Proper configuration is everything, of course, and you have to turn on WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) shared key security, but it's not exactly difficult. You just have to select the option from a drop-down menu."
The article also cites the upcoming IEEE 802.11i standard that will supposedly tighten wireless security. While I understand what Peltier is saying about configuration, I still feel that one should assume wireless is insecure because there are several factors to consider.
Unless you set up your own wireless network, you just don't know what equipment is being used. Most users don't care to even know if it is 802.11b, g, or i. They just want to be wireless.
Another point is that wireless in the corporate environment may be more controllable, but it costs money to upgrade. Companies may not be able to justify the cost of upgrading. In addition, coffee bars and other public access services may never upgrade to 802.11i or won't until the equipment fails. We will be using 802.11b for years and years to come and we never know when and where that will be our only choice.
Wireless is more than just 802.11 anyway. Cell phones can be intercepted, for example. A reasonable paranoia about wireless is a good thing. You never know who has what equipment and where that equipment sits in the architecture of a wireless configuration. New standards have to be adapted and all of the users have to buy into it before you can chunk the old standards completely. So don't get lulled into a false sense of security because a new, stronger security standard is coming out.
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