 | This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia.(January 2014) |
Network cloaking is a method of providing network security by hiding the devices behind the network gateway.
| This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia.(January 2014) |
Network cloaking is a method of providing network security by hiding the devices behind the network gateway.
Network cloaking may provide more operational security through obscuring devices from hackers. To access a network behind a gateway, an authorized user must authenticate themselves to the gateway before it allows them to see the devices they are permitted to by the security policy.
Network cloaking obscures devices through the cloaking system. It differs from a firewall, which allows specific types of traffic in. The system does not respond to scans, and the devices behind it cannot be discovered or analyzed, preventing known or zero-day vulnerability exploitation. The internal devices cannot be accessed unless connected through a secure tunnel.
Secondary Usage:
The term has also been used to refer to wireless security by hiding the network name (service set identifier) from being broadcast publicly. Many routers come with this option as a standard feature in the setup menu accessed via a web browser.
Network cloaking may stop inexperienced users from gaining access to a network but should otherwise be considered a minimal security measure.
More secure forms of wireless security include WPA and WPA2. [1] WEP, WPA, WPA2, and other encryption technologies can be used in conjunction with hiding the SSID.
Hiding the network name may not deter attackers from connecting to the network. Hiding the SSID removes it from beacon frames, but this is only one of several ways an SSID can be discovered. [1] When users chooses to hide the network name from the router's setup page, it will only set the SSID in the beacon frame to null, but there are four other ways that the SSID is transmitted. In fact, hiding broadcast of the SSID on the router may cause the Network interface controller (NIC) to constantly disclose the SSID, even when out of range. [2]
Hiding the network name improves the experience of users connecting to wireless networks in dense areas. When the network is not intended for public use and does not broadcast its SSID, it will not appear in a list of available networks on clients. This simplifies the choice for users.
Organizations may decide to cloak the Wi-Fi SSID intended to be used by employees and pre-configured on corporate devices while keep networks intended for visitors (i.e., “Guest networks”) broadcasting SSID. This way, authorized users will connect to the corporate network as pre-configured while visitors will only see the “Guest network” and will be less confused about what SSID to use.
Although network cloaking may add a small sense of security, it is common for people not to realize just how easy it is to discover hidden networks. Because of the various ways an SSID is broadcast, network cloaking is not considered a security measure. Using encryption, preferably WPA or WPA2, is more secure. Even WEP, while weak and vulnerable, provides more security than hiding the SSID. There are many programs that are able to scan for wireless networks, including hidden ones, and display their information such as IP addresses, SSIDs, and encryption types. These programs are capable of "sniffing" out any wireless networks in range by essentially eavesdropping and analyzing network traffic and packets to gather information about those specific networks. [3] [4] The reason these programs can sniff out the hidden networks is because when the SSID is transmitted in the various frames, it is displayed in cleartext (unencrypted format), and therefore able to be read by anyone who has found it. An eavesdropper can passively sniff the wireless traffic on that network undetected (with software like Kismet), and wait for someone to connect, revealing the SSID. Alternatively, there are faster (albeit detectable) methods where a cracker spoofs a “disassociate frame” as if it came from the wireless bridge, and it sends it to one of the clients connected; the client immediately re-connects, revealing the SSID. [5] [6] Some examples of these sniffing programs include the following:
Passive:
Active:
The downside of passive scanning is that in order to gather any information, a client already connected to that specific network needs to be generating and therefore providing network traffic to be analyzed. [7] These programs are then able to discover the cloaked networks and their SSIDs through picking through frames of information such as: [8]
Because of these multiple ways the network name is still being broadcast while the network is "cloaked”, it is not completely hidden from persistent hackers.
Worse still, because a station must probe for a hidden SSID, a fake access point can offer a connection. [10] Programs that act as fake access points are freely available; e.g. airbase-ng [11] and Karma. [12]
IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards. IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires. IEEE 802.11 is also a basis for vehicle-based communication networks with IEEE 802.11p.
A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office building. This gives users the ability to move around within the area and remain connected to the network. Through a gateway, a WLAN can also provide a connection to the wider Internet.
Wi-Fi is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves. These are the most widely used computer networks, used globally in home and small office networks to link devices and to provide Internet access with wireless routers and wireless access points in public places such as coffee shops, hotels, libraries, and airports.
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A wireless distribution system (WDS) is a system enabling the wireless interconnection of access points in an IEEE 802.11 network. It allows a wireless network to be expanded using multiple access points without the traditional requirement for a wired backbone to link them. The notable advantage of WDS over other solutions is that it preserves the MAC addresses of client frames across links between access points.
A beacon frame is a type of management frame in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. It contains information about the network. Beacon frames are transmitted periodically; they serve to announce the presence of a wireless LAN and to provide a timing signal to synchronise communications with the devices using the network. In an infrastructurebasic service set (BSS), beacon frames are transmitted by the access point (AP). In ad hoc (IBSS) networks, beacon generation is distributed among the stations. For the 2.4 GHz spectrum, when having more than 15 SSIDs on non-overlapping channels, beacon frames start to consume significant amount of air time and degrade performance even when most of the networks are idle.
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IEEE 802.11w-2009 is an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard to increase the security of its management frames.
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[...] the SSID is nothing more than a wireless-space group label. It cannot be successfully hidden. Attempts to hide it will not only fail, but will negatively impact WLAN performance, and may result in additional exposure of the SSID [...]
it is highly recommended that you do not use non-broadcast wireless networks.Note: Here the term "non-broadcast" means a network that does not broadcast its SSID or broadcasts a null-SSID instead of the actual SSID.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) Demonstrates the use of "Karma" to respond to any probe request beacons.