Glenn Fleishman, of TidBITS and MacWorld, has posted an article about a long delayed but very welcome security improvement in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Users can now use WPA2 connection encryption when using a Mac as a Wi-Fi router. It allows sharing the Internet with other Macs on a network. Apple has dumped worthless old WEP into the dumpster of the decrepit, although WEP is still available if you're stuck sharing with older hardware that is WPA2 illiterate.
Read all about it:
Software Base Station in Mountain Lion Adds Modern Encryption
. . . But Internet Sharing’s security options were left firmly mired in the 1990s until Mountain Lion. For years, Apple offered only 40-bit and 128-bit WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). WEP was the original “link-layer” encryption built for 802.11b, the first widespread wireless local area networking protocol put into use, starting in 1999. WEP had a lot of compromises, partly because of encryption export restrictions at the time and partly to accommodate the minimal computational power available in router-sized devices. WEP was shown to be thoroughly broken by about 2003, and subsequent years have brought tools that can extract a WEP key and see all the traffic on a network in a matter of seconds.
. . . This situation has at last been resolved in Mountain Lion, although it’s not listed among the 200+ features that Apple trumpeted...Glenn is the author of the eBook 'Take Control of Your 802.11 Airport Network'.
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