[ham-80211] Re: WEP encryption?

[Brian Riley (maillist)]

Ham satellite command uplinks have been encrypted for years with the FCCs
specific blessing ... all quite legal. The encryption's purpose is not to
"obscure" but to provide security.

In that sense WEP and WPA for that matter are a joke. They demand precious
horsepower from the relatively puny CPU's in the WAPs that they can ill
afford to give up. It would be better to run SSH/SSL and let the big iron on
our laptops and desktops do it with much greater ease. Use of SSH/SSL would
be just as legal as the use of WEP and a damned sight more manageable.

Here in the Burlington, VT area Univ of Vermont runs an enormous (50-75
WAPs) wireless network using this method with great success and pretty good
throughput.

On 6/23/04 11:53 AM, "Walt DuBose" <dubose at texas.net> wrote:

> Without getting into details, Gerry and I are quite confident that
> encryption for the purpose of access/authentication control are
> acceptable to the FCC...we just need to sniff out at what level the FCC
> would be comfortable with.  Additionally, I personally believe that they
> were concerned with obscuration on frequencies below 2M anyway (this
> from orignal FCC documents fo 30-40 years ago) and perhaps today only on
> frequencies 900 MHz and up and especially where we share frequencies.
> In fact, they may not give a hoot if we encrypt or not on the higher
> bands.  But that's just my feeling.