Subject: [LL6] security considerations for wireless LANs

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:08:13 -0500

I think this needs to be much stronger than the text proposed.

A host should NEVER automatically configure itself to a wireless LAN,
regardless of whether it is using LL or DHCP or some other mechanism,
unless the LAN can authenticate itself and the host has been configured
to trust it.

I just received my laptop back from repair.  Before I shipped it off for
repair they asked me to change the root password so they could run
diagnostics on it.  Not wanting to disclose my normal password, I
changed it to a "throwaway" password which is deliberately chosen to be
insecure, and enclosed a note indicating that password.  

(There was nothing sensitive on the laptop, and I decided that I would
trust this vendor to not modify the laptop in such a way as to further
compromise security. This may have been unwise on my part, but at least
it was an explicit decision.)

When I got the laptop back, I was very careful to not connect it to a
network until I had changed the root password back to something
reasonable.  But in the process of doing so I found that the laptop had
automatically connected to the local wireless LAN, exposing it to
attack.  (The laptop was _not_ configured to do so when I sent it off,
because connectivity to the wireless LAN from my office is marginal, and
100Mb ethernet is much faster anyway.)

Keith