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Re: [LUG] is your network secure?

 

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Paul Sutton wrote:

On 28/10/10 10:55, Jaan Janesmae wrote:
Actually, with wpa and wep all your communication is crypted. I mean
It is much harder to listen to your traffic. On a open wifi box there
is none of that. Basically the same thing when using hubs instead on
switches for your local lan.

Regards,
Jaan


So this suggests that a switch also encrypts data on the network between
computers attached to it

or don't i understand something here?

Hubs are older technology where it creates a single LAN with all data going to every node at the same time. This is the basis of the original Ethernet on co-ax. Cat-5 cabling and hubs just made it easier.

Switches isolate traffic, so that traffic going from port 3 to port 5 doesn't get re-transmitted to all the other ports. (However they do recognise broadcasts and then do transmit that to every port)

This would on the surface seem to make them secure and immune from traffic snooping however there are techniques that you can use to capture switched traffic.... Google for ARP cache poisoning if you want the gorey details...

This is something that would be good to discuss at a lug meet,

It needs some hardware for a practical demonstration - I do still have an older 8-port 10Mb hub, complete with co-ax connector... However I don't think I have any co-ax networking cable, although I do have a few older 10Mb Ethernet cards with co-ax connectors on them...

The ironic thing is when I first enquired at paignton library I
mentioned things like talks on internet safety (which the above would
come under) as one of the things we would like to do (as a public
service sort of thing), it is the sort of thing they want to encourage.

For the average home user, security at this level isn't that important - just make sure you use encryption on the wi-fi and any hacker will move to the next house unless they're really really desperate...

Gordon

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