Lord Necron Posted December 17, 2009 Share Posted December 17, 2009 From http://www.informationweek.com/ The House of Representatives is finally about to get with the times and will soon install a Wi-Fi network, it announced late last week. The roll-out will take place over as long as three years, according to a statement of work posted on the Web site of the House's chief administrative officer and a synopsis of the effort posted on federal procurement Web site FedBizOpps. A House spokesman hinted the effort could be completed before then, but declined to give any firm timeline. Beginning as early as January, the House will create a number of wireless hotspots in cafeterias. Eventually, the 802.11n network will blanket the four House buildings and the U.S. Capitol building, including hearing rooms and members' offices. The only real wireless access points in the House today, as the statement of work makes clear, are disparate and often member-operated networks, which are unmonitored and may be unsecure. In hearing rooms and across Capitol Hill, visitors, members, and staffers typically rely on spotty 3G signals or suffer without any network access. Though the House has conducted several Wi-Fi pilots in the last few years, those efforts have never made it out of the pilot stage. In addition to engineering challenges stemming from having a 505,000 square foot, multi-building campus and thick marble walls, one key concern, according to the spokesman, is cybersecurity -- members of Congress and the Congressional IT infrastructure would clearly be prime targets for hackers. The House will also require the contractor who installs the network to include network management and security tools, provide training, and eventually maintain the network. In terms of security, the House wants the network to be able to locate rogue access points and users. In looking forward, the House also anticipates using the wireless network for things like voice over WLAN and location-based applications The wireless network is actually part of a larger trend in the House of Representatives toward centralization of historically decentralized IT resources. For example, server consolidation is another major effort currently underway in an effort to decrease the size and complexity of the House's data center. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 yah, sounds like a horrible idea to me. Hell, I just read this and if I were to go after 'teh houze' I would look for a way to 'reflect' wifi signals and try to get it through a window, then using a serious cantenna, pick it up from the far side of the reflecting pond, and make sure it's hidden as something. bam, there you go. I don't see why this is even a thought. Why don't they just use an unspecified signal of some different type than ethernet thta get's fed into a proxy server behind a firewall. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 Unless its like encrypted GSM data or something(which is probably not what they would use anyway), this sounds like a bad idea. WEP,WPA, and WPA2 have all been cracked, and just like darren mentioned in the last episode, they have a site now that lets you enter the SSID and handshake data to crack in real time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Netshroud Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 How hackable would 802.1X be? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 I thought 802.1X is all part of the WPA supplicant process anyway, unless you were talkign about Radius or Certificate services. I think they have a hack for Radius as well though, but I could be wrong... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 Only thing about radius is the question of can you use airplay to get the radius server to take it. This really should be left to someone with proprietary stuffs. And besides, they want to find rogue access points and users? If you sniff discreetly your not being a 'rouge access point' but that can be masked as well. Just look at the monkey! one of darren's fav. things about it, is you can't tell it's on the network. It doesn't show up as a hop at all, and there is no addition to the layer 2 timer, which means it's virtually invisible. Tell ya this much. I'm glad I am not the guy on that job. Whoever it is, is going to have some VERY sleepless nights. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seshan Posted December 18, 2009 Share Posted December 18, 2009 This makes sense now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norwat Posted December 19, 2009 Share Posted December 19, 2009 What about WPA2-Enterprise ? How secure is it ? If you cant get the user credentials how easy it is to crack ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted December 19, 2009 Share Posted December 19, 2009 This makes sense now. Ya know that is EXACTLY what I was thinking when I read the post origionally, I just couldn't remember who it was so I knew there was no real use searching for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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