Secure Wireless Home Network

[digitalzero]

I've 3 computers at home at the moment. All have wireless capabilities. Since our neighbours seem to all be getting wireless, i'm concerned about the security of my files. I want to be able to allow only my computers access to our internet gateway and also my shared files. Is there a way I can password my wireless network?

[Hayl]

you are going to want to set up WEP. Wireless Encryption Protocol. How you enable it is going to vary depending on what hardware your Wireless Access Point is. i don't own any wirelss cards so I am not familiar with how to enable WEP under Linux although, I assume its as simple as making some simple changes to some text configuration file.

[z0mbix]

Originally posted by Hayl
you are going to want to set up WEP. Wireless Encryption Protocol.

I don't like to be anal but WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy ;)

[Hayl]

Originally posted by z0mbix
I don't like to be anal but WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy ;)

bah. well it was a good guess for someone with no wireless at home :)

[Gertrude]

1.) change the default password on your access point.. If someone gets into that you are screwed.

2.) Change the default SSID. This is just a name that identifies your network, even though by default with out WEP the SSID is transmitted in clear text its better to change to something besides the default for example linksys uses "linksys" so change it to something like "assmasterexpress"

3.) As Hayl said use WEP, even though there are flaws in the way certain manufacturers implement it on their cards, they still transmit week encrypted packets that can be exploited its still better than nothing.

4.) Update firmware on all cards and access points, to protect against certain vulnerabilities that may exist

the above 4 things will protect you against 95% or wardrivers and the like.. If your still worried keep reading..

5.) Implement MAC address filtering so that only clients with a certain MAC address can connect to your access point, not at all 100% secure but it will spoil the attempts from novices

6.) Set up a RADIUS server, I'm not going into detail on this but two open source RADIUS servers are FreeRADIUS, and OpenRADIUS

http://www.freeradius.org/
http://www.xs4all.nl/~evbergen/openradius/

7.) Because there are issues that can be overcome by relying on MAC addresses and the RADIUS server. One could implement VLANS as well. Again I'm not going into too much detail, but what a VLAN could do is create a separate LAN from the wired one. When doing this you would need to change the broadcast domain or subnet of the wireless network so that it is different that the subnet of the wired domain. You could then set up a VPN to create a wireless access control method so that users would have to log in with a username and password, all of this info would be
encapsulated into encrypted packets and not be seen in clear text.

[digitalzero]

Currently, I dont use any access points.. I have a windows xp machine that does Internet Connetion Sharing.

I pretty much dont know anything about wireless with Linux, that's why I'm using the Windows XP for internet sharing.
I've set up the WEP. How do I set it up for my Linux Laptop which usually connects to my computer via dhcpcd?

I am using Slackware.
and configurations are at: /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1
thanks in advance.