Stories by Andrew Lockhart

Securing a RADIUS server

For any corporate wireless infrastructure to remain secure, using 802.1X for authentication is a must - after all, it provides much more granular control of authentication credentials and can provide accounting for wireless LAN usage. Setting everything up can be a complex process fraught with choosing the right EAP type that both your clients and your RADIUS server supports in addition to putting in place the PKI infrastructure that some EAP types require. During this whole process one thing can often be overlooked - the security of the RADIUS server itself.

Finding wireless devices doing MAC spoofing

MAC spoofing on a wireless network creates an interesting problem - you want to locate the imposter, but how do you tell the different between it and the legitimate device from the network's perspective? Like Ethernet, 802.11 makes use of a device's MAC address to uniquely identify it on the network. However, it's trivial to change the MAC address of a wireless interface under most operating systems. While MAC spoofing can be detected it can be difficult to locate the offending device once you know it's occurring.