Lab publicizes another Wi-Fi worry.

EDN, November, 2006

by Matthew Miller Hoping to head off a potential security threat, Sandia National Laboratories has demonstrated a passive technique that unsavory characters could use to identify the device driver in use by an 802.11 radio. The perpetrators could then exploit the information to launch a driver-specific attack.

The technique analyzes the timing of the "probe-request frames" that Wi-Fi cards or modules send out as they scan for access points. Because the 802.11 specifications don't explicitly spell out this part of the implementation, device drivers from different companies use different and, thus, identifiable timing, according to the Sandia researchers. The lab's "fingerprinting" technique requires only a few minutes' worth of network...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.