Wireless Part 1

Hey so as i hope you know, i'm Spectr3 - Hi :D - and i'm currently a first year at university, but i love wireless. My personal background that got me into wireless security was when WEP got broken. So i want to do a set of blog posts on wireless security. More specifically i want to show you how to break it properly.

What this will be about:

Its all well and good to know how to break it, saying "and type this in and you should get something that looks like this" without you knowing what is actually going on. So in this series, i'm going to be using my personal knowledge i have built up over the years to explain different wireless methods, and different attacks in as much detail as i know it at at the time of writing.

What is a wireless network

Wireless network means just that a network without wires. We use a radio frequency (either 2.4GHz or 5GHz and soon 60GHz) to transmit the bit patterns. This is a post set on wireless security and not on signal multiplexing etc. so i wont go into that here.

Issues arising

The problem there is for many people and business's is in metaphor you are throwing paper airplanes of information into a bin (or wireless access point). This is great, but anybody could come and grab those planes as they glide towards the bin, and even worse, not all will get there, some will miss. As a result wireless security is incredibly useful.

Wireless Bands

So we have mentioned that the wireless networking (802.11) uses different wave bands (2.4GHz, 5GHz, etc.) but how does this work?

You have different wireless types, there the a/b/g/n/y/ac/ad. These all have different properties, here's a quick table.

Wireless type	Range	Maximum Rated speed	Waveband
Legacy	100m	2MB/s	2.4GHz
802.11a	120m	54MB/s	5GHz
802.11b	140m	11MB/s	2.4GHz
802.11g	140m	54MB/s	2.4GHz
802.11n	250m	150MB/s	2.4GHz and 5GHz
802.11ac	Unknown	900MB/s	5GHz

I think that will be it for today, next time ill go through a very brief history of wireless and how we get more speed out of 802.11n than what in the table. Thanks for reading, please comment so i know how i'm doing and know what to change for next time :)

-Spectr3