Vista & 'hidden' SSID

stockhausen

stockhausen

stockhausen

Capodecina
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30 Jul 2006
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Yesterday evening, I tried to help a neighbour connect his laptop to broadband using his Netgear DG834G ADSL Wireless Modem Router.

I connected up without problem, changed the SSID and setup MAC filtering. I could restart or shot-down and then power-up his laptop and it connected to his Wireless device without problem.

However, when I changed the router settings to not broadcast the SSID, he could no longer reconnect to it if he powered his laptop off and back on again. I tried it on my laptop (with XP) and had no problem.

His laptop is some HP job and it runs Vista. So long as the SSID is visible, he can connect up without problem.

Any idea why this would happen and how to get round the problem?
 
I believe there is an option in Vista along the lines of "Connect even if the network is not broadcasting"

Should sort you out.

Edit - Blatently stolen Google Image result:

vista-wireless7.jpg
 
More to the point, why on earth are you using MAC filters and hiding the SSID when all you should be using it WPA and nothing else?
 
I wanted to use WPA2 for our network but half the people in the house don't have compatible equipment :(

I use WPA with MAC filtering, but the SSID is broadcasted just for simplicity.
 
MAC filtering really doesn't provide any security. If someone can get through WEP or WPA then it will take them minutes to get through filtering and it can be such a headache to manage.

About a year ago i attempted to break a test wireless network which was using WEP, mac filtering and no SSID. It took me about a day, WEP was the only thing which took time.

A wireless network using WPA (with a strong password) alone would be virtually impossible to break.
 
Of course, brute force is not the only method though :)

AFAIK you cannot man in the middle WPA but there are certainly other ways of obtaining the key. Highely unlikely but MAC filtering, although relatively easy to bypass might well throw someone off.
 
Last edited:
Sin_Chase said:
Of course, brute force is not the only method though :)

AFAIK you cannot man in the middle WPA but there are certainly other ways of obtaining the key. Highely unlikely but MAC filtering, although relatively easy to bypass might well throw someone off.
Click to expand...

What are these certain ways? References please. Once you've decrypted the traffic you can see the MAC addresses and then mask them. As I say, if someone has gone to all that trouble that's not going to throw them off.
 
Key extraction from any system that used that network with that WPA encryption is childsplay.

Windows does store it.

As I said, highely unlikely but very very easy and very possible.

While in this specific instance it is probably not a concern for him I can think of plenty of places where such a method might be employed. A net cafe using a hidden SSID on WPA where you could easily run a single executable and extract the stored keys for example.
 
Well that isn't a weakness of WPA. Of course you can extract the key. You could kidnap the bloke and torture him for 3 hours to get the key off him, that doesn’t mean WPA is flawed!
 
Where did I say WPA was flawed?

Merely made the point that security methods beyond pure WPA and a hidden SSID are not as fruitless as you might like to suggest, regardless of how easy they are to circumvent.
 
Many thanks for all the debate about the merits or otherwise of WEP & WEP and comments on the efficacy of MAC filtering and not broadcasting the SSID.

However, none of this really addresses the original question:
Any idea why hiding the SSID would stop a laptop running Vista from connecting to a wireless router to which it previously connected quite happily and how to get round the problem?
Click to expand...

With thanks to Sin_Chase whose suggestion I will investigate over the weekend :)
 
Sin_Chase said:
Where did I say WPA was flawed?

Merely made the point that security methods beyond pure WPA and a hidden SSID are not as fruitless as you might like to suggest, regardless of how easy they are to circumvent.
Click to expand...

Why aren't they fruitless? They make administration harder and don't offer any benifit. In your own scenario of someone obtaining the WPA key from a machine using an exe they could extract the SSID and the MAC of the wireless NIC using the same exe. In that scenario you would use RADIUS authentication.

Anyway, this isn't on topic and i don't have an answer to the OP so i'll shutup :p
 
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