Byzantium/Byzantium — Issue #56: Request for comments: Wireless encryption by default.
Author: virtadpt
Created: 2011-11-10 19:21:24+00:00
State: open

It's been suggested to us that we configure the network interfaces to be encrypted by default, i.e., at a minimum picking WEP but WPA may also be an option. This would help protect OSI layer 2 and above from certain spoofing attacks, as well as adding a thin layer of privacy atop mesh traffic. If the settings were not standardized (i.e., defaults were not set in the Byzantium configs) this would stand in the way of ad-hoc deployment (because small cabals of hackers would have to decide on WEP/WPA settings and make sure that everybody within earshot knew about them). This would also stand in the way of clients connecting randomly to the mesh to make use of it because it would require more knowledge than just seeing "Byzantium" or "Free Mesh Network" or something in the wi-fi control panel of their device.

Frankly, I can't see this being of much use to us. WEP is trivially easy to break. WPA is stronger but still crackable by a determined enemy (certainly anyone capable of wanting to take down the mesh in a Egypt Problem scenario) in a reasonable period of time. It's going to hang up potential users who are conditioned to see padlocked (i.e. encrypted) wireless networks and ignore them because "they don't have the password anyway."

Thoughts anyone?