Wireless Security on Games Consoles
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008It is criminal in my opinion for gaming devices, which are ever more popular, to support such lowly encryption methods as only WEP - which has been thoroughly hacked over and over again and is useless. All WEP encryption will stop is the man sitting outside your house in his car, typing away on his laptop, not even that really if he has any sense he can crack the key in under 15 minutes.
Related to this is the Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP’s support of only 802.11b. The 802.11g protocol had been aroung long before the release of these devices yet they didn’t see fit to support this higher bandwidth protocol.
I argue that security features like this are far more important than parental controls. Having to downgrade one’s wireless security setup to something inferior such as WEP to have it supported by all devices is a terrible situation akin to being between a rock and a hard place. Do you want to lose functionality or do you want to lose security - you simply should never be put in this position by a responsible company. If this was a business grade product then it would not have been tolerated.
At least the Nintendo Wii supports WPA2-PSK (AES) but it’s far from an ideal situation. You have to sacrifice speed of the overall network to run in mixed mode and not 802.11g only mode.