On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 13:15 -0500, Javier Perez wrote: > Sorry to barge in, but I wondered why is it "erroneous" to believe > that broadcasting the SSID would lower the security of my wireless > rig? I know it is security through obscurity and I do not depend only > on that to keep my wifi safe. Nevertheless, it is one more step for a > would be attacker. It's "erroneous" in that it provides *no* increase in security. It doesn't /slightly/ improve things, it provides *NO* increase in security. There's a lot of bad advice about turning this off, even from official sounding places. Hiding it doesn't thwart hackers for anything more than a few moments, and those few moments don't do you the slightest bit of good; in that regards, its utterly pointless. Hiding it can cause you problems connecting to your network (finding your network, not accidentally connecting to the neighbour's network, etc.); in that regards, it's worse than useless. Hiding it can cause you problems when your neighbours accidentally connect to your network, because the SSID wasn't there for their software to be able to automatically ignore the wrong network; again, in that regards, its worse than useless. That's the explanation in a nutshell. If you want more details, you can Google wireless security myths. There's plenty of pages that explain it. But considering the overall issues, the details are pointless. It's self evident that it's not a good idea. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
