Major Wireless Security Flaw Revealed
The next time you're sipping a latte and surfing the Net at your favorite neighborhood wireless caf?, someone just a few seats away could be breaking into your laptop and causing irreparable damage to your computer's operating system by secretly tapping into your network card's unique device driver, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in have concluded.
There is, however, some cheerful news. By role-playing the position of an adversary (also known as red teaming), Sandia researchers have demonstrated a unique "fingerprinting" technique that allows hackers with ill intent to identify a wireless driver without modification to or cooperation from a wireless device. Revealing this technique publicly, Sandia researchers hope, can aid in improving the security of wireless communications for devices that employ 802.11 networking.
