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My
Publications -
Tutorials
A
War Driving Experience - Part I: The Results
By
Eric Geier
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Originally Published by Wi-Fi
Planet on January 31, 2006 -
During the
last few weeks, I put the geek hat on and took to the road for some
war driving. My goal was to capture a good amount of data on wireless
networks residing in homes and businesses. Then, later I would export
and compile the data to come up with some interesting statistics and
tips to share with others.
My setup in
the car was pretty straightforward, just me in the driver seat and
riding shotgun was my laptop running AirMagnet’s
Laptop Analyzer software. However, I had some help keeping safe. A few
times my two-year-old daughter rode along in the back seat, and she
often yelled, “Be careful!” especially when taking sharp turns.
My intention
was to capture the data from wireless networks so I would be able to
show statistics for homes and another set for businesses. This is
important because I thought what I would find for each would be
dramatically different. For example, I made sure I only drove through
housing areas that were away from any businesses. I also used a
similar approach when capturing data from businesses. I drove through
downtown Dayton, here in Ohio, and several other retail and office
building complexes around the area.
After the fun
of driving around, the tedious process of exporting and compiling the
data began as I tried to remove public hotspots from some of the data
to make the statistics a bit more accurate. I also edited the data so
the statistics for businesses would show a percentage based upon
individual businesses instead of the number of access points (APs)
captured within business locations.
For example
every time I would drive past a Home Depot store, AirMagnet would
capture up to 15 APs with the Service Set Identifier (SSID) of
“orange.” In this case, I would include all APs as a single
network. However, when passing some businesses, I would only capture
one AP, which is also one network. The reason that I did this was that
I wanted to show statistics of actual businesses such as the
percentage of businesses that use encryption.
The Results
The first
statistic I show in Figure 1 is the amount of businesses and homes
that didn’t change any of the default settings on their wireless
routers or access points. To find these wireless networks, I looked in
the capture files for entries with a default SSID, channel, and with
no encryption enabled. Using a list of default settings including the
SSID and channels for each vendor, I could easily assume which
networks were set up right out of the box with no configuration
changes. This includes the people who either don’t pay attention to
installation instructions or don’t care to make the changes.
Figure 1: Wireless LAN Configuration Statistics for Homes and
Businesses
I then figured
the percentage of homes that use their wireless router’s default
channel, which is normally 6 or 11. The problem with using the default
channel is that there’s a much greater chance of interfering with a
neighboring AP. I didn’t show the percentage of businesses that use
default channels because I didn’t think it was necessary and the
findings wouldn’t be of use because most businesses have more than
one AP.
When setting
up wireless networks with more than one AP, you should use the
non-overlapping channels 1, 6, and 11. Therefore, I didn’t find a
reason to show which APs use default channels as there really
shouldn’t be default channels defined for enterprise APs.
I was
surprised that 62% of homes were using encryption on their wireless
network. I was assuming I would find much less, around 40%, based on
previous experiences. Homeowners must be getting the idea now that
security is important. 25% of homeowners seemed to have not changed
any default settings, though, which isn’t good either.
Finding that
only 72% of businesses are using encryption isn’t the best; however,
I was excepting around that number. I believe companies still need to
work on educating themselves about the vulnerability of wireless
networks. Security is necessary to avoid a hacker from getting access
to sensitive company information.
Figure 2 shows
the 802.11b/g channels I found used by businesses on their access
points. You may find it a bit unusual that over 20% of the channels
used were other than the non-overlapping channels of 1, 6, and 11.
Wireless networks use spread spectrum technology and the wireless
signals bleed to other near-by channels. Therefore, you should setup
multiple APs with the non-overlapping channels.
Figure 2: Channels Used in Businesses.
Keep in mind
that even if you make sure you use non-overlapping channels, always
perform RF site surveys to find the best channel. This ensures nearby
homes or businesses aren’t interfering with your wireless network
and that your APs are placed properly.
Figure 3 shows
the channels used by the homes I surveyed during the war drive. The
results I found are expected since most wireless routers come loaded
with channel 6 or 11 set as default. To avoid inter-access
interference, these users should set their wireless routers to
different channels, such as channel 1.
Figure 3: Channels Used in Homes.
Stay Tuned
– Later in Part II we’ll compare my findings with other war
drives. This will give us a good idea of the trends related to Wi-Fi
network configurations and security.
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