Simson Garfinkel has a new

Simson Garfinkel has a new essay up, about wireless connections, security and privacy. I nodded my way through the first third of the essay before coming to the bit about 802.11 networks (the real meat of the article), when I found myself vigorously shaking my head. Garfinkel thinks that longer keys are the answer to securing wireless transports, and I think that's way off base. To my mind, Internet connectivity is getting a lot more promiscuous: from cablemodems to wireless connections to Internet cafes, we find ourselves connected to a lot of random networks these days. The answer isn't securing the transport — which is hard, since a new security implementation is inevitably flawed and needs many iterations to patch all of its problems (the problem with WEP wasn't the short key, it was implementation) — but rather, the protocols themselves. Ssh tunnelling scripts are getting easier and easier to implement, and they don't care what kind of network connection you have. Look down to the blog entry when I used ssh tunnelling to circumvent Earthlink's dumbass mail-restrictions with a single line. Link Discuss