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Windows Mobile brings down Wi-Fi networks June 30, 2006 [Wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ...)] | By Edward J. R. All you need is: Centrino based notebook with Wi-Fi, a Windows Mobile phone or PDA Wi-Fi and with this combination you can bring down Wi-Fi networks because of error in Microsoft software! The situation can be described as follows: if a user is connecting his Centrino notebook to Wi-Fi access point with use of WPA-PSK encryption and then this user is trying to connect his Windows Mobile 5.0 device over USB with help of ActiveSync software, then Wi-Fi connection is totally broken and nobody can use any longer this Wi-Fi access point! Switching off the WPA-PSK encryption in the Wi-Fi acess point, or turning on (totally insecure these days) WEP encryption results in proper operation. Since public Wi-Fi access points never use WPA encryption, this problem will not enable hackers to bring down public hotspots, but in corporate and private environments where WPA-PSK key is used, this problem may: not only bring down the Wi-Fi networks but make it difficult (if not impossible) to synchronize properly Windows Mobile device with a PC (or with Microsoft Exchange server). Clearly with introduction of Windows Mobile 5.0 and new ActiveSync for this version, Microsoft has introduced new ActiveSync model that instead of using serial connection, uses network connection model, what however clearly was not well enough tested in Microsoft. It is also worth mentioning that Microsoft made huge mistake by removing the feature of ActiveSync over Wi-Fi synchronization altogether! Previously, in older versions of Windows Mobile, it was possible to synchronize with your PC over Wi-Fi (and thus also over whole Internet) but out of security reasons Microsoft removed this feature (instead of just disabling this feature by default). Conclusion: since these days WPA encryption in Wi-Fi access points is a necessity - WEP is incredibly easy to crack - therefore this problem may disturb many users. This problem also occurs with very new Windows Mobile phones like HTC StrTrk and O2XDA mini, so clearly this problem is still pertinent. For more information see here (in German) or here (in English). Credit: John Lose.  Post your comment (free registration is required to post, but if you register you can edit your posts later) [ 6 Comments ]
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