Wireless
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Course
Difficulty
Intermediate
Video Transcription
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>> Hi, and welcome to Module 2, Lesson 3.4.
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In this lesson, we're going to discuss
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the wireless environment and some of
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the security aspects of that environment.
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This will be our last lesson in
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the network layer section of this course.
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Our next section, we're going to
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discuss things on the endpoint layer.
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In this lesson though for wireless,
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we're going to discuss basically two main things.
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This is going to be a very quick lesson,
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I'm just going to gloss over some
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of the access and encryption
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things that are appropriate for wireless security.
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Access, we're talking about how
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endpoints actually gain access
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to the wireless environment,
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and an encryption is the type of
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encryption we use within that environment.
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Let's start out with talking about access.
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First thing I want to say as passwords
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can be cracked, everyone knows that.
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A lot of environments unfortunately are configured,
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the wireless environments are configured
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so that if you connect to the SSID,
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you're prompted for a password,
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like maybe your home environment does this.
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If you know the password,
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that's all you need to know.
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You can get on the network
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and you're on their unfettered.
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Well, the problem in a corporate environment or in
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a sensitive organization environment
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that might be fine for home,
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but in a sensitive organization,
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people are going to put
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a sticky note on the wall that has
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the wireless password in it because
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people ask them what it is all the time.
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A lot of times organizations that use
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passwords for wireless have
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the same password across
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all of their wireless environments.
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They may have 50 locations,
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the same password is in every one of those environments.
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If I walk into
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a small strip mall store front for the organization,
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there's probably going to be two
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or three people working there.
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They're going to be a lot less secure
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than company headquarters,
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they may have a sticky note on the wall that
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has the wireless access password.
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If I obtain that,
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I can use that password and go walk into the main lobby
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at the data center or at
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the HQ building of the same company,
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and chances are I'm going to be able to get on
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their wireless environment using the same password.
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Passwords can be cracked.
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It's a weak method of security.
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We should use certificates and
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802.1x in lieu of passwords.
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Like we discussed in our network
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access control module in the previous section.
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The last thing we'll talk about when it
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comes to access is,
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you should think about where
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your access points are positioned.
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Now, a lot of times geography comes
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into play and you don't have a lot of control over it.
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But wherever possible, try to place
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those access points in locations where
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their transmit range isn't going to bleed too
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far into environments that are out of your control.
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For example, if you have an access point
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and you place it by a window,
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half of that radius is going to be inside your building,
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but the other half of that radius is going to
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be in your parking lot.
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Someone can sit in their car in
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your parking lot without ever gaining access to
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your building and try to connect
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to your wireless environment.
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This is called war dialing.
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Think about access point placement as
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you're building out your wireless infrastructure.
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A lot of times there's not a lot you can do about it.
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I know there's situations where you're on one floor,
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you've got someone above you and
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someone below you and there's not
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a whole lot you can do about bleed
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over going into different floors.
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But there's a few things you can do as far as placement.
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Access points have directional antennas,
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so you can point the transmission in certain directions.
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You can also usually tweak the range of certain devices.
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So if you've got a spot in the corner that doesn't have
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good coverage and you
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want to put an access point in that corner,
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at least tweak the range so it
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just covers the corner and it doesn't
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blast through the whole building
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and way out into the parking lot.
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When it comes to encryption, really,
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there's three main types of encryption that are
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out there available when you're setting
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up your Wi-Fi environment.
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The first one is WEP,
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and that stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy.
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Really this was the first
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encryption standard for wireless.
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It's not secure anymore,
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it's pretty easily hacked these days,
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it only uses 128 bit keys.
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Remember when we talked about encryption,
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we talked about the key being secret.
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The more complex the key itself is,
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the more difficult it is to reverse
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engineer that algorithm and
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figure out what the data actually is.
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With WEP, it was cracked long ago.
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Honestly, you shouldn't use WEP at all,
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there shouldn't be any reason to
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use WEP in today's world.
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If you have a device that can only communicate WEP,
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you should really take a hard look at
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changing that device out and
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figuring out if you can live without that device.
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WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access,
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and that's stronger than WEP,
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it uses a 256 bit key.
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But really this one was built as
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an interim replacement for WEP.
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When we figured out WEP wasn't secure,
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there was a mad scramble to get something more secure
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in place and WPA came about.
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It's better than WEP,
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but really there's no reason today we
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shouldn't be using WPA2 for everything.
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In all cases unless there's
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a device that just simply cannot speak WPA2,
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we should always use
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that method because it's the best one out there today.
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It uses AES encryption algorithms,
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which we discussed in the encryption section
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as being the most secure algorithms out there.
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That's really all there is to know about
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wireless encryption for this intermediate course.
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That takes us to the end of the wireless course,
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and it also takes us to the end of
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our section on the network layer.
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Next class we're going to talk about
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the endpoint layer and all of
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the components at that layer in Lesson 2.4.
Up Next
Anti-Virus
Patch Management
Config Management
Web Application Firewalls
DevSecOps
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