SSID & Mac Code

Hi someone on another forum told me to d/load inSSIDer to see if any of my channels were clashing with the neighbours, anyway i notice that my router and next doors and possibly others in the street are all showing there Mac address and SSID codes is their anyway to stop this and could people use that information.

thanks

Steve

This is nothing to worry about. Just make sure you have WPA1 or WPA2 security turned on.

You can usually stop broadcasting SSID, but no harm's done.

could people use that information?

yep, apple, google and others use locally received wireless-network names/mac addresses for geo-location

Hiding them causes problems and has no benefits.

You can _nomap i.e "YOURSSID_nomap", if you don't want google to record your mac in their database.

In reply to a post by neathblue:

Hi someone on another forum told me to d/load inSSIDer to see if any of my channels were clashing with the neighbours, anyway i notice that my router and next doors and possibly others in the street are all showing there Mac address and SSID codes is their anyway to stop this and could people use that information.

thanks

Steve

Hi, thanks for the info, I will now use inSSIDer on my computer, it�s a clever little programme. I see the MAC address is the MAC address of the router and vendor is the router manufacture name, it shows my router as 2Wire, Inc. The programme can still see your wireless router even without the SSID broadcast, clever!

I use WPA-TKIP with 63 random alpha-numeric characters long password for maximum wireless security.

https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/download/

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For wireless security I use Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte advice from Security Now.

Bad WiFi Security (WEP and MAC address filtering)
Leo and I answer some questions arising from last week's episode, then plow into a detailed discussion of the lack of security value of MAC address filtering, the futility of disabling SSID's for security, and the extremely poor security offered by the first-generation WEP encryption system.

podcast 11 http://aolradio.podcast.aol.com/sn/SN-011.mp3

podcast 13 http://aolradio.podcast.aol.com/sn/SN-013.mp3

https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

Edited by deleted (Sat 10-Dec-11 12:26:35)

E7er - I suggest you read up on using WPA2-CCMP (AES) - it is cryptographically stronger than TKIP technically.

Not that it makes a great deal of difference these days - there a several services being offered using vast Amazon EC2 clouds to brute force passphrases (WEP, WPA or WPA2) from wireless traffic dumps (aircrack-ng capture for example). The sheer number of CPUs/GPUs that can be thrown at the task makes it relatively trivial even with a 63 character randomised passphrase.

Why anyone would want to go to even that much effort to gain access to a residential WLAN is another question. I can see it might be a concern for corporates running WLANs.

Sorry to dig up an old thread but this is plain wrong.
Assuming you acually have a random password (e.g. generated by a computer, dice rolls etc) then a 63 character mixed case + numbers password has 8 x10^112 combinations = 375bits i.e way stronger than AES256. Even a 21 character mixed case + numbers password offers 125bit security which is nearly at the AES128 level. Currently 112bit is considered secure until at least 2020 and that is a against a government adversary (i.e. someone like the NSA that can build custom cracking chips). To 100% scan even a 80bit key space in a year would take a computer that can do 3.8x10^16 calculations per second i.e 38 petaops/s which is bigger than the bigest known supercomputer and that is only a 14 character mixed case + numbers password!
Of course WPA also hardens your password with 4096 rounds of HMAC-SHA1 salted hashing which I have not considered in these calculations, which actually makes the problem much harder than stated.