Subject: Re: Who is interested in wireless cards for the Adelaide IETF meeting?

From: Randall Gellens <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 18:31:17 -0800

At 12:57 PM 2/15/00 +1030, Mark Prior wrote:

>The package being offered is a WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11Mbps PC card for
>AU$276.36 (approx US$175). Drivers are available from Lucent for (at
>least) Windows 95, 98, NT, CE, 2000, MacOS and Linux.

Searching for "WaveLAN" at a catalog site shows (prices are in US$):

         LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
         WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless
         PC Card Silver; WEP
         $159.95

         LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
         WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless
         PC Card Gold; 128RC4
         $176.95

          LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
         WaveLan Wireless Bronze PC Card
         *While Supplies Last
         $235

         LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
         WaveLAN IEEE Bronze PC Card
         *Special Order
         $239.95

Could someone explain the differences between these?  Is the first one the 
same as what is being offered?  If so, it appears to be cheaper to buy it 
in the US.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 19:20:48 -0800 (PST)

> >least) Windows 95, 98, NT, CE, 2000, MacOS and Linux.

I'm certainly not an expert on this stuff, but as it happens I've been
playing around with a bunch of it recently both at home and at work. My
comments below are based on this experience.

>          WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless

This is the same card as an Apple Airport. It is 802.11 DS, 11Mbps, and
supports Wire Equivalent Privacy (WEP). The idea here is that you need a key to
get on the network, but once you're on you can see all the traffic "on the
wire" that you care to. The Apple softare only lets you set a 40 bit key
(actually what you do is enter a passphrase that is hashed down to 40 bits),
but I believe a 64 bit key is supported by the underlying hardware. I don't
know what the underlying crypto is -- probably DES, which of course means
the key length is really only 56 bits...

Unfortunately the Windows 2000 driver for this card doesn't yet support WEP.
They say they are working on it. Amusingly, the Windows 95/98 driver does
support WEP and it works just fine with an Apple Airport Base Station as long
as you have a Mac with an Airport card to set up the base station to begin
with. (Actually, even that probably isn't required unless you want to enable
WEP or DHCP or NAT or some other option.)

All this stuff about security probably isn't relevant in the IETF context, of
course, but it nice if you what you get also is useful at home where network
security may matter a bunch.

$159 is about the same price I've seen for this card in the US. 

>          WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless

I believe this is the same as the Silver except the crypto is 128 bit.

>          WaveLan Wireless Bronze PC Card

I believe this card only operates at the slower 1-2 MBps rate. This
is supposed to be compatible with the faster cards but I have not tried one to
make sure.

I believe some of these cards support WEP, but only at 40 bits.

The price here seems way too high -- why not get a silver card instead?

>          WaveLAN IEEE Bronze PC Card

I don't know what the difference between this and the previous card is, if
any.

> same as what is being offered?  If so, it appears to be cheaper to buy it

I hope this helps some.

				Ned

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 09:36:47 +0000

At 02:31 04-03-00 , Randall Gellens wrote:

>Could someone explain the differences between these?  Is the first one the same as what is being offered?  If so, it appears to be cheaper to buy it in the US.

Mail-order/web prices for the Lucent WaveLAN Turbo Silver PCMCIA card are cheaper
in the US than at the IETF-discounted price in Adelaide.  That noted, a lot
of IETF folks are coming from other countries, where the IETF-discounted price
might represent a very considerable savings versus their local price.  Also,
there are "loaner" cards available at IETF (for credit card imprint) permitting
folks to try one out before purchase, etc.

The difference between Silver and Gold is the quality of the crypto supported,
by the way.  In AU, it appears that Gold cards are available for sale only to financial
institutions or government-related institutions.

By the way, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have device drivers for the Lucent
WaveLAN PCMCIA cards according to their respective web sites.

Ran
[email-masked]

---

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 13:09:00 -0500

> wire" that you care to. The Apple software only lets you set a 40 bit key
> but I believe a 64 bit key is supported by the underlying hardware. 

[Warning...  gory crypto details enclosed.  I'm not a cryptographer,
just a protocol engineer who uses the stuff every now and then..]

I haven't found specs for the "128"-bit WEP supported by the turbo
cards, but the standard version of WEP (which I believe is what's
implemented by the Silver cards) uses RC4 with a 64 bit key but
roughly 40 bit effective strength.

RC4 is a stream cipher -- it generates a pseudo-random bitstream which
then gets XOR'ed with the plaintext.  If two (or more) packets share
the exact same keystream, there are various cryptanalytic techniques
which can be used to easily extract plaintext from one or both of
them.  (among other things, this is why reusing a one time pad is so
dangerous).  It's also usually very easy to inject chosen plaintext
into a low-level network component, which makes keystream recovery
even easier.

So, to address this within WEP, 24 bits of the 64 bit packet key are
used as an "initialization vector"; they're chosen different for each
packet and are sent in the clear in the WEP header; the remaining 40
bits are a secret shared by the nodes in the network.

However you still run into the "two time pad" problem if IV's are
reused, which will definitely occur by the time 2**24 packets have
been sent through the network using a given key (and may occur much
sooner depending on how IV's are chosen).

I hope the 128 bit "gold" cards use a longer IV..

						- Bill

---

From: Garrett Wollman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 14:00:35 -0500 (EST)

<<On Sat, 04 Mar 2000 09:36:47 +0000, RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]> said:

> By the way, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have device drivers for
> the Lucent WaveLAN PCMCIA cards according to their respective web
> sites.

And thus also for other vendors' badge-engineered Lucent cards (e.g.,
Cabletron).

-GAWollman
(writing today as <[email-masked]>)

--
Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
[email-masked]  | O Siem / The fires of freedom 
Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA|                     - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick

---

From: "Marcus Leech" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 16:08:25 -0500

> I hope the 128 bit "gold" cards use a longer IV..
Does anyone know if the 128-bit variant of WEP is openly specified anywhere?

With the spinoff of the Enterprise portion of Lucents business, will the
  128-bit variant quietly die?  I hope not (assuming that it's any good, of
course).

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 02:07:39 -0500

> institutions or government-related institutions.

Is there an issue with either (a) Australian nationals buying them offshore
and importing them for their personal/company use or (b) non-Australian
nationals bringing them with them for use while in the company?

Or are they merely only being marketed to those two groups?

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 18:29:50 -0800

>Does anyone know if the 128-bit variant of WEP is openly specified anywhere?

The last I heard RC4 was owned by RSA and not exactly open. But I do have a 
PDF file describing Lucent's WEP implementation a layer above RC4, so it 
covers some of the key management details. If you really need it, let me 
know. Also you can read the encryption section of 802.11

>   128-bit variant quietly die?  I hope not (assuming that it's any good, of

Certainly not. But as someone else mentioned, there are U.S. laws or 
regulations restricting sales of 128-bit encryption overseas. So I kind of 
doubt it will be enabled on the base stations in Adelaide. But I suppose 
you can purchase such cards in the U.S. and they will work fine in Adelaide 
with encryption turned off.

As for pricing, note that the price for the cards that will be sold in 
Adelaide are in Australian dollars which are valued quite differently than 
U.S. dollars.

Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer or a crypto expert. Nor do I work in the 
Wavelan division of Lucent. I'm just lamely trying to help.

---

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Mar 2000 18:54:44 -0500

Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]> writes:
> The last I heard RC4 was owned by RSA and not exactly open.

RC4 is completely public, though against the will of RSA. It's even
described in Schneier.

> regulations restricting sales of 128-bit encryption overseas.

Those have been relaxed of late, as you may know.

-- 
Perry Metzger		[email-masked]
--
"Ask not what your country can force other people to do for you..."