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My
Publications -
Tutorials
A
War Driving Experience - Part II: Comparing the Results
By
Eric Geier
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Originally Published by Wi-Fi
Planet on March 17, 2006 -
In Part
I of this tutorial, I explained how I performed a war drive to
collect useful information, such as the percentages of homes and
businesses that use encryption, hidden SSIDs, and default RF channels.
For example, many access points are tuned to the factory default
channel. This can limit the capacity of your WLANs if residing in
areas with many separate networks, such as apartment complexes and
business parks. As a result, be certain to analyze the local radio
environment and possibly set your access points to non-default
channels.
In this part
of the tutorial, we’ll take a look at the results of the WorldWide
WarDrive (WWWD), an organization with the goal of promoting a more
secure wireless networking community, and compare the WWWD results to
the war drive I described in Part I. This will provide a good idea of
the trends related to Wi-Fi network configurations and security.
For four
years, with help from thousands of people ranging from security
professionals to enthusiasts driving around and capturing information
from hundreds of thousands of wireless access points and routers, the
WWWD collected configuration information of wireless LANs. The WWWD is
no longer collecting data, but the statistics from their organized war
drives are still posted on their website. They believe all the hard
work paid off and their mission, to create awareness of security
issues, was completed.
The figure
below shows the results
of my war drive, with homes and businesses combined, and the
results of WorldWide WarDrives in 2002, 2003, and 2004. This provides
a good comparison and shows the changes in the behavior of the
administrators of wireless networks in the past several years. Of
course, I didn’t capture as much data as the thousands of people did
for the WWWD’s. Nevertheless, I believe that I came up with some
relevant results.
Comparison
of Wireless LAN Statistics
Despite a few
hiccups along the way, all the issues discussed in Part I have
improved during the last several years. For example, as you can see,
the most significant jump was between 2004 and 2006 for the percentage
of wireless networks using encryption. In these years, the use of
encryption doubled. Users and administrators are getting the right
idea.
Encryption is
certainly important, but remember to use not just one security
mechanism, but many. For every new security method, there will be
people poised to break it. Implementing security methods in layers
provides a higher level of security. In addition to using encryption,
consider not broadcasting the service set identifier (SSID). Also, the
use of VPNs can offer a higher degree of security, even when operating
wireless devices from public networks.
The decrease
of out of the box setups without configuration changes and the use of
fewer default SSID settings, as shown in my data, also indicate a move
in the right direction. This means that users are getting more
comfortable with configuring wireless LANs, and the networks have
higher resulting levels of security and performance!
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