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Security
Using an actual base station you can limit access to a list of hardware IDs (MAC addresses). I'm not keen on an increasingly large 802.11b-equipped laptop population robbing my bandwidth.
Security
With 10.2 Apple re-introduced the software base station feature back into the OS. Surely this has some kind of protection built in... doesn't it? Can't find any docs on it though... and until I do I am not going to get a pair of AirPort cards for my laptop and desktop combo.
Security
1) Use an Airport network password
Security
I actually went cheap and decided to use my G4 as the base station. This is very easy to achieve: just get an Airport Card and set up sharing in System Preferences->Sharing->Internet. Unfortunately, it is equally easy for anyone in range of my signal to obtain a connection (any 802.11b WiFi device that can be configured using DHCP can get it).
Security
Overall, the whole firewall-NAT situation seems to have changed in Jaguar. For example, the Internet Sharing feature seems to start a process called "InternetSharing": /usr/libexec/InternetSharing InternetSharing seems to be able to start the AirPort software base station up in "infrastructure mode" rather than "ad hoc mode." This is an interesting difference ... with "ad hoc mode," you have a computer-to-computer network. With "infrastructure mode" you have what amounts to a "real" wireless access point. You could regain some security by configuring the OS X DHCP server (which I assume InternetSharing is helping to start/configure) to only allow certain MAC addresses. Every Ethernet and wireless card has a MAC address, and although many let you modify those addresses nowadays, it's at least one more form of security. Used in conjunction with other security measures, it can be more effective. I don't know how to configure it to do this yet. To encrypt traffic, you can either turn on WEP, or you can use VPN. There are some tutorials over at AFP548.com that I want to try; they tell you how to operate a PPTP server or IPSec tunnel from Mac to Mac. With VPN, particularly IPSec, all of your traffic is transparently encrypted behind the scenes, and more securely (in general) than WEP. Still, that's not necessarily for those who don't want to mess with the Terminal. It would be cool to see someone come up with a comprehensive GUI for all this, similar to the way Brickhouse was evolving for 10.1. |
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