Comments on: How to secure your wi-fi router

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:13:41 +0000

I ran the passphrase advice past WhiteQueen, and a couple of CISSPs, and they agreed that a nonsensical sentence like that is just fine. The key is to making it long enough and including a couple of punctuation characters and numbers, which your example does.

A coworker (one of those two CISSPs, in fact) showed me a secure, cloud-based password service just a couple of days ago. I’ll ask him the name of it. The advantage to that, over a piece of paper, is that if you have to look up a password while you’re on the road, you can do it. That’d be a good topic to cover later this week.

By: robohara

robohara — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:21:25 +0000

The most important aspect of wireless security (I’m talking about home-based routers here, not businesses) is simply not being the “lowest hanging fruit” around. In other words, if all of your neighbors have no security, WEP is probably good enough. If all your neighbors are using WEP, I recommend WPA (and so on). I used to have a few old NICs still in service around the house that didn’t support WPA, so for a long time I was stuck running WPA. I think everything (including all our iToys and gaming consoles) support WPA now, so it’s no longer an issue.

For businesses though, yeah, all bets are off. I recently helped a client lock down his office, and this is what I did: (A) enabled WPA2, (B) relocated router so that it wasn’t quite so easily to pick up the signal with a default antenna in the parking lot, and (C) have him turn off the router after hours and on weekends.

By: Glaurung_quena

Glaurung_quena — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 21:24:50 +0000

Re: strong passwords. You’re allowed to use spaces in WPA2 passphrases, so: use a sentence, properly punctuated, spaced, and capitalized, as long as is allowed, that means something to you that nobody else will be able to guess (Something like “My shameful secret: I had a total crush on Buck Rogers when I was 12!”) Congratulations: you’ve just made a password that’ll be easy to remember and totally impregnable against dictionary attacks for the forseeable future.

Since half the Wifi drivers out there are too stupid to allow you to see the passphrase as you type it, I’ve taken to typing my passphrase into a notepad document and then pasting it into the password field.

Naturally I write all my passwords down on a paper that I keep in my desk at home next to my birth certificate and passport and mortgage papers.