security

"Nawa" wrote in news:1131193586.449351.185220 @g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

The personal FW should be stopping all unsolicited inbound traffic from the Internet by itself. Only solicited inbound traffic should be coming through to the machine behind the PFW solution due to some program on the machine initiating outbound traffic to a remote/IP. If you're sitting there making rules to band IP(s), then you're wasting your time and effort as the PFW is stopping the unsolicited inbound traffic to the machine automatically, unless you have mis-configured the PFW yourself.

If the computer has a direct connection to the Internet (no router sitting between the computer and the connection to the ISP), then you should go to the MS O/S and secure it a little bit from being attacked and not depend upon the PFW solution as some stops all and ends all solution. That's if you have one where configuration of the O/S can be done to harden it to attack.

The buck stops at the O/S and there is one for Win 2K too. If you're using Win 9'x or ME, you're out of luck.

Secure your traffic with VPN. Seriously.

That in itself isn't that helpful an answer though because to use a VPN he has to have a second endpoint. You can't just "use a VPN".

Besides, the broadcast traffic is still visible, PPTP authentication is weak and there's that IPSec flaw that popped up fairly recently.

VPN's aren't the big solution to wireless security at all.

David.

Actually you can, since there are a number of affordable VPN services; e.g.,

(free) In addition, a fair number of ISPs now offer VPN service; e.g., Sonic.net

IPsec is quite robust; PPTP is quite sufficient for most purposes; and broadcast traffic isn't an issue.

I respectfully disagree.

My point was they require two endpoints so now that you have provided the extra information to the OP, that's more helpful.

Ok then by the same token, WEP is quite sufficient for most purposes!

Broadcast traffic provides "information". You'll see IP addresses, IPSec is susceptible to ARP poisoning, you'll see Netbios traffic which includes which machines are domain controllers for example and which machines have who logged on, nice free info for your attack vectors.

Can't remember the full details but IPSec had a recent serious flaw documented and PPTP is just plain weak in authentication and doesn't provide mutual authentication.

You have the right to disagree but like I said, while people might choose to use a VPN for wireless security, they're not the big solution and suffer from plenty of limitations. A few more:-

IP only (might not affect too many people) What client are you going to use on a PDA? What EAP type are you going to choose? One crypto mechanism for the purpose of deriving a session key for the second crypto mechanism for your data - which do you want to be strongest? Hence, choose the weakest. How are you going to knock off a stolen device off the network?

I'm not just referring to using a VPN for home security but a rather bigger picture here.

David.

Apples and oranges.

Provide actual citations (as I did) if you want to be taken seriously.

Not really, the objective is security, all 3 have issues in delivering that.

Google for "Ipsec flaw"