From: InfoSec News (isnC4I.ORG)
Date: Sat Apr 14 2001 - 14:32:40 CDT

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/18285.html

By: Kevin Poulsen
Posted: 13/04/2001 at 08:20 GMT

In a parking garage across from Moscone Center, the site of this
year's RSA Conference, Peter Shipley reaches up though the sunroof of
his car and slaps a dorsal-shaped Lucent antenna to the roof-- where
it's held firm by a heavy magnet epoxied to the base.

"The important part of getting this to work is having the external
antenna. It makes all the difference" says Shipley, snaking a cable
into the car and plugging it into the wireless network card slotted
into his laptop. The computer is already connected to a GPS receiver
-- with its own mag-mount roof antenna -- and the whole apparatus is
drawing juice through an octopus of cigarette-lighter adapters. He
starts some custom software on the laptop, starts the car and rolls
out.

Shipley, a computer security researcher and consultant, is
demonstrating what many at the security super-conference are quietly
describing as the next big thing in hacking. It doesn't take long to
produce results. The moment he pulls out of the parking garage, the
laptop displays the name of a wireless network operating within one of
the anonymous downtown office buildings: "SOMA AirNet." Shipley's
custom software passively logs the latitude and longitude, the signal
strength, the network name and other vital stats. Seconds later
another network appears, then another: "addwater," "wilson,"
"tangentfund."

After fifteen minutes, Shipley's black Saturn has crawled through
twelve blocks of rush hour traffic, and his jerry-rigged wireless
hacking setup has discovered seventeen networks beaconing their
location to the world. After an hour, the number is close to eighty.

"These companies probably spend thousands of dollars on firewalls,"
says Shipley. "And they're wide open."

"Absolutely Huge"

Dramatic drops in hardware prices over the last year have made it
enormously attractive and convenient for corporations and home user to
go wireless, in particular with equipment built on the 802.11 standard
- which was popularized with Apple's AirPort, and is now widely used
on PCs. But computer security experts say that in the rush towards
liberation from the tethers of computer cable, individuals and
companies are opening the doors to a whole new type of computer
intrusion.

"It's absolutely huge," says Chris Wysopal, also known as ""Weld
Pond," director of research and development at Boston-based Stake.
The company added wireless auditing to their consulting menu
approximately two months ago, after months of laboratory research
convinced them that it was a grave problem. "802.11 is inherently less
secure than other wireless technology, Wysopal says, "and the way it's
being deployed makes it worse."

The 802.11 cards and access points on the market implement a wireless
encryption standard, called the Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP), that
in theory makes it difficult to jump onto someone's wireless network
without authorization, or to passively eavesdrop on communications.
But in January, researchers at the University of California at
Berkeley published a paper revealing a number of severe weaknesses in
WEP that allow attackers to crack the crypto with sophisticated
software, and ordinary off-the-shelf equipment.

"Hardware to listen to 802.11 transmissions is readily available to
attackers in the form of consumer 802.11 products," reads the paper.
"The products possess all the necessary monitoring capabilities, and
all that remains for attackers is to convince it to work for them."

But the consensus at the RSA Conference is that attackers hardly need
resort to cryptanalysis. Most networks in the wild aren't using WEP at
all, or are using it with the encryption key set to one of several
well-known default values.

According to Wysopal, many corporate and home users erroneously
believe that their network name, or 'SSID', serves as a secret
password. Other implementers simply don't consider that their wireless
network's electronic "cloud" extends beyond the walls of the building.
If they've set up their wireless access points behind their firewall,
they're opening their internal network to anyone with a laptop. Even
if they put their access points outside a firewall, intruders may be
able to use them to get out to the Internet, whether to stage attacks,
or just for free bandwidth.

"I think almost every large hi-tech corporation has wireless exposure
now," says Wysopal. "Sometimes you can just drive into their parking
lot... turn on your laptop and be on their network. We've seen it in a
lot of brand name companies that you would recognize."

Al Potter, Manager of Network Security Labs at ICSA, has one word for
the exposure he's seen: "Terror."

War Driving

Many here believe that hackers are already cruising around
metropolitan areas in cars and on bicycles, with their laptops
listening for the beacons of wireless networks. Using such a network
doesn't even require special software or hardware, an ordinary $150.00
consumer wireless card will latch on to the beacons and put you on the
net.

Grand computer capers will be pulled off, not from bedrooms and
college dorms, but from windowless vans in company parking lot, and
from park benches and empty stairwells. "It's fun, it's the new
thing," says Wysopal. "It's kind of like war dialing: you never know
what you're going to get."

War dialing is the timeworn technique in which a hacker programs his
or her system to call hundreds of phone numbers in search of poorly
protected computer dial-ups. The name comes from the movie WarGames,
which features Matthew Broderick performing the technique.

In the late nineties, as a research project, Peter Shipley war dialed
every phone number in the San Francisco Bay Area-finding dial-ups
leading to banks, hotels, and scores of unprotected personal
computers. The survey took three years to complete. The goal, Shipley
said, was to raise awareness of the threat posed by unprotected
modems, and the project won attention from the print media and online
news.

Now, in the same spirit, and with the help of some hobbyist friends,
Shipley plans to "war drive" the streets of San Francisco, Oakland,
and portions of Silicon Valley to the south. When he's done, he'll
have a database that maps the geographic location of, in all
likelihood, thousands of open 802.11 networks. He doesn't plan on
publishing the raw data -- he doesn't want to help attackers spot
choice targets -- but he says the numbers will speak for themselves.
"I can give you the density of open networks an area, organized by zip
code," says Shipley. "People don't believe there's a security problem
if you don't prove it to them."

Shipley says he doesn't plan on actually using anyone's network. But
to make the experiment real, and, perhaps, to avoid unwanted
attention, he's already plotting ways to hide the hacked antenna
magnetically held to the roof of his car. "I'm thinking of putting a
pizza sign on it."

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