I-O Data's WN-G54/R4 WiFi router lets your handheld bypass security

There's just nothing more enraging (okay, so maybe there is, but that's beside the point) than getting your shiny new DS Lite / PSP slim home and realizing that your router's security settings are so far into the realm of overkill that your handheld will simply never make it through to the intarweb. Thankfully, I-O Data is offering up a new wireless router that provides an alternative to just deactivating your security measures altogether. The WN-G54/R4 supports 10/100BASE-T wired connections and 802.11b/g on the wireless frontier, and it stands out from the others by including a Quick Start Game button that enables a "dual configuration" setup. In essence, this feature allows your portable gizmo of choice to quickly bypass the red tape while everything else connected to your network remains locked down. If this sounds like just the solution you've been scouting, you can snag one now for ¥8,400 ($73).

[paul34 @ Oct 24th 2007 7:59PM]

Heh, happened to me. First day I got my iPhone, I realized that my 64-character randomly generated alphanumeric (with lower and upper case) passphrase just wasn't going to really be practical anymore.

[gabe kassel @ Oct 24th 2007 8:03PM]

doesn't Buffalo have their AOSS thing designed to solve this as well?

[Jonathan Zencovich @ Oct 24th 2007 8:04PM]

Sounds innovative.... but highly insecure.

How does it determine which device gets to bypass the security and which one doesn't?

It probably wouldn't be too hard to let a laptop take advantage of this "feature" and bypass the encryption.

Thanks, but I think I'll pass.

[Will @ Oct 24th 2007 8:20PM]

My guess would be by MAC address. If so then you're correct, it's easy to spoof if you have any idea what you're doing.

How about mobile device manufacturers start putting in decent support for network security? This is like having an excessively restrictive firewall, and fixing it by letting any program that asks nicely connect to whatever it wants. Can be made to sound nice for marketing, but doesn't actually work.

[Mii @ Oct 25th 2007 12:19AM]

Probably it has a second NAT (perhaps with a bandwidth cap) to the low security handheld that's not bridged to the internal network segment with the high-security Wifi and Ethernet ports, with multiple SSIDs. Someone may be able to hack in, but the worse they can do is steal wifi and download pron.

[Jack @ Oct 25th 2007 4:41AM]

I agree sppofing a mac address is simple, but you do need to know the address to spoof...

[bob @ Oct 24th 2007 8:06PM]

cool

[Adam @ Oct 24th 2007 8:35PM]

Meh. The latest version of DD-WRT has a function that should do the same thing. You can create multiple virtual wireless access points (WAPs), presumably (though I don't know for sure) each with different security settings. The benefit of these setups is that you can give devices connecting to the low-security WAP access to the Internet, but not to other devices on your LAN. But if you want to print to your network printer or access your NAS, you need to connect to the WPA2-encrypted WAP. A good idea for those who need it, but you get get this from a $50 router too if you use open source firmware (and you want to spend hours properly configuring it--another reason I don't have this set up on my router).

[Carbonize @ Oct 24th 2007 8:37PM]

Or you could disable encryption and just set your router to only allow connections from a list of mac addresses.

[tiuk @ Oct 24th 2007 8:58PM]

Except MAC addresses are easily spoofed.

[Carbonize @ Oct 24th 2007 9:02PM]

Yes so long as they are either prepared to try and brute force an allowed address or try and grab yours. I'm lucky enough to live in suburbia so don't have anyone near enough for me to worry about it.

But then it's always fun to walk down the road scanning with my PSP and seeing how many routers I can find.

[Jonathan Zencovich @ Oct 24th 2007 9:25PM]

@Carbonize

Bruteforcing MAC addresses would take FOREVER. It's much easier to sniff the router in question, take note of the actual clients communicating (write down their MAC addresses...) and either wait till they disconnect OR deauth them :)

From there you could try to either login into their router and add your MAC address to the whitelist OR if you're bold enough you could remove MAC filtering altogether... hope no one notices....

[Carbonize @ Oct 24th 2007 11:34PM]

Well they could try but my own router is set up to only allow admin access via a wired connection.

But, as has already been stated, how is the router going to differentiate between a PC and a PSP?

[Luigi193 @ Oct 24th 2007 9:01PM]

GENIUS!

[kneeyogi @ Oct 24th 2007 9:24PM]

I know for a fact that this Belkin router (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=136493) which I bought about a year ago and has probably been around for quite a bit longer than that, has this feature in stock firmware.
Basically you can set up two networks (one secured, one not) and I believing it's something like NATing the two networks separately.

[Vinay @ Oct 25th 2007 12:29AM]

How different is this from the De Militarized Zone (DMZ) feature on Cisco / Linksys routers?

[Ben @ Oct 25th 2007 2:37AM]

DMZ is a setting of the built in firewall. This has nothing to do with the firewall and is referring to the wireless security settings.