re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityThey claim the scanning process is much less than other scanners (microseconds vs. milliseconds), thus the availability to keep the AP online while scanning (as the story specifies). Also, I'm curious why you say "if it was real it wouldn't be availabe in Q2 2006."
Not carrying water for Meru -- I'd like to hear more specific objections to this technology.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityMarketing fluff (not that Meru doens't have too much of this), if it was real it wouldn't be availabe in Q2 2006.
Plus, could it be more vague? Micro-scanning - you mean going off channel for a few milliseconds and listening? Blasting white noise on a channel without intefering?
Looks like Meru is making a defensive announcement because everyone is doing this today - Cisco/Airespace, Aruba, Bluesocket, Colubris, Trapeze, Air Magnet, AirDefense and the list goes on.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityMy point was if this was something solid you would announce it and ship it. Why are they announcing something that now that they will have in May or June?
I'd give more specific objections if they gave specifics on what it does. Microseconds to scan? How would you see a beacon that is sent every 100ms? I'm sure the scanning companies like AirMagnet, AirDefense, Network Chemistry would have something to say about this.
I have no problem with something new. My only issue is that they give no details on what they are doing or really how its different (is that because its not shipping until Q2 and they don't know yet). Meru has never participated in an open bakeoff with Network World, etc...
So, they claim all this great technology without any details, yet never show up at a bakeoff.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityOnly Meru could market a denial of service attack as a feature. Since they preach all Access Points on one channel it would be easy for them to fill the other channels, unused by Meru Wireless, with traffic. They probably send big packets at 1Meg and never back off when collisions are detected. Or they use RTS packets back to back to make everybody wait. They can't use this strategy on the same channel as their APs.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityI don't see how Meru have the right to jam a close-by network which might have just as much right to use the same channel or channels as the 'protected' network. While the 'product' is aimed at 'enterprise', in a dense urban environment, often stations or access points from an external network could have stronger signals than some of the networks own STAs or APs. Really, this sort of 'jamming' ought to be illegal.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityMeru insists that its version is legal because it jams only the offending client. I will pass on your comments to them for further explanation.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityBoring....been there done that stuff. Everyone and their mother implemented these type of features years ago. Wireless IDS/IPS was a nice marketing spin that had about one years worth of life back in 2003. Now, if they can come up with an integrated wired/wireless story then I will stop blasting Meru's "security" press releases.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityHere's more from Meru marketing director Joel Vincent:
"After reading the conversation on the message board I would clarify that we don't do anything to clients that don't match the criteria for a rogue.
"Jamming is a simple more graceful method of rogue mitigation. Instead of sending de-auth packets (as others do) we jam the offender at the radio level so that everyone else ignores them.
"The method we use is not at the packet-level so there is no network flooding or any such thing. We only jam rogues. Its a more graceful, less traffic-intesive mitigation technique that frees the WLAN from excessive de-auth packet transmissions."
Did you know that Meru only supported scanning intervals of 1 minute until this release. Airespace, Aruba and perhaps even Trapeze have been doing millisecond scanning for ages now. Aruba claims that they can now even support scanning without compromising voice QoS by implementing higher layer protocol understanding which affects RF scanning periodicity.
This microsecond scanning seems like a lot of marketing hoopla.
What happens when you scan for a few microseconds and don't catch the rogue APs beacons which are usually set to transmit every 100 milliseconds?
Also, jamming is illegal according to the FCC. What does Meru say about that?
I see this Meru articles as biased reporting in exchange for advertising which Meru seems to do a lot on unstrung.
re: Meru Offers RF-Level SecurityDid you cut and paste this from your last posting trying to slam Rick? How about something original and/or at least interesting. What do you have against Rick?
>I see this Meru articles as biased reporting in >exchange for advertising which Meru seems to do >a lot on unstrung.
Not carrying water for Meru -- I'd like to hear more specific objections to this technology.