Thoughts on WEP in WPA WLAN?

May 16, 2005 3 Replies

We have a prety well configured WLAN: WPA+TKIP using Radius and client certficates. (we have 150 W2kXP machines using this setup). All APs are Cisco AP1200s and support multiple VLANS



Now we want to add in some Wireless projectors *without* compromising our security. Problem is that that projectors (Sony) only support WEP 128 (which they promote as *secure*) through their air-shot technology (come on Sony get WPA support worked out!).



Question: Any recommendations for the bset way to setup these WEP devices so that they dont act as a weak point into our otherwise secure WLAN? I thought: a) Create NEW SSID called WEP128 and associate with new VLAN b) setup projectors to connect to that SSID b) Set Mac address filter on the APs for the projectors mac addresses (there are only a few and they dont move so list is not dynamic) c) Some sort of access lists at the router to control packets between WEP128 and the rest of the LAN - I'd need to work out what packets need to travel across to the projectors.



Any better ideas? Anyone done this already? Anyone know when Sony will have WPA on their projectors?



What are the risks:


- someone spoofs the projector Mac address and gets onto the WLAN and gets an IP



- someone breaks the WEP key and reads traffic between the projector and the client PC - depending on the traffic this might be useful......



- anything I forgot?



Al Blake, Australia


hope for the vendor upgrade and put the projecters on a external network.

Is there no authentication on the projectors? I've only vaguely played with a Hitachi wireless projector and admit to not even looking at that in detail.

It's a possibility. If this is the weak point, you could say this would be pretty high up.

Maybe.

Does the projector *have* to be wireless? There's a couple of other ideas:

Get a wireless-wired bridge that supports WPA. So the AP1200 - Bridge part goes as WPA and then converts down to a wired signal to the projector?

Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

Do you know of any wireless-wired bridge (or so called wireless adapter) that support wpa and possibly eap? Tnx, Max.

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