- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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An editor should have a pimp for a brother so he'll have someone to look up to - Gene Fowler
Car park capers foiled
A SYSTEM purpose-built to prevent sensitive information 'leaking' out of office buildings is to be made available by Meru Networks. It prevents hackers sitting in the company's car parks from eavesdropping on wi-fi networks.
Meru's RF Barrier product is quite sophisticated, employing directional antennas mounted outside the walls and a special wireless access point (WAP) along the inside perimeter of a building.
The WAP inspects the traffic in real time to determine which data appertains to the WLAN being protected and is therefore designated as sensitive. It then tells the directional antenna to block that bit of the RF spectrum.
RF Barrier technology then uses the external antenna to block outbound traffic at the RF layer. Would-be attackers are limited in their ability to see useful packet information about the internal network.
Meru claims that 'parking lot attacks' – sometimes known as 'war-driving' – have proved successful in the past with one involving the theft of millions of users' credit card records.
One of the advantages of RF Barrier is that it can protect wi-fi networks which use older security protocols such as WEP or WPA/TKIP, as well as modern WPA2 and EAP protocols.
The system can be turned off so that employees can work outside the building in the summer if the organisation wants to let them.
The INQ is currently checking on the legality of using such equipment in the UK given that cellular signal blockers are banned in Britain.
The product should go on sale in September and be priced from $3,595 (£1,800). µ
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For £500 you can have my old microwave. Whenever it's running my laptop drops off its wifi connection to the router.

Needless to say I didn't like being in the same room as the old microwave... I'd hide in a different room and wait for the "all clear" ping!

The cat however is not so bright, and now has 2 tails.
This sort of WiFi jammer could probably be defeated using a better antenna. Choose a location where there is a good angle between the target and the jammer and aim you high gain antenna to the target. If necessary, add a second element and place your antenna array's null onto the jammer. Not trivial, but pretty close. Might need to munch down plenty of Pringles to obtain the necessary hardware.

...but I thought cellular blockers were only illegal as they by design had to transmit on the same licensed frequency as the cell itself, which is a big no-no.

802.11a/b/g/n is license-free, so presumably as long as the ERP of the jammer is within territorial limits, presumably there's no problem. Besides, they're only jamming data which the owner themselves generated in the first place.

Or they could just install a 2.4GHz wireless camera - they do a surprisingly good job of killing wireless networks :-)
the link given has a couple of typos in it. 
It links to: 
http://ww.merunetworks.com /

instead of:
http://www.merunetworks.com/
Marketing people are never very good at net security so they tend to mess up their copy.

If you're using a decent commercial AP, not one designed for the home, then it will support EAP and will keep the wardrivers at bay. (Actually, if its really good it could direct these to outside the fence -- handy for visiting reps -- but you'd need one that understands VLANs.)