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Between the months of May and early August 2002, Irish technology consultancy Enigma and the Communications Network Research Institute of DIT have been war-driving throughout Dublin to collect information on the city's wireless local area networks. Although analysis of the figures in the research is not yet complete, the groups behind the report gave ElectricNews.Net an early glimpse into its findings.
The researchers behind the report, which will be published later this year, were able to detect 378 access points for 802.11b in the section of Dublin that spans from Sandyford Industrial Estate to Dublin Airport in a north-south direction. In an east-west direction, the war-drivers travelled between Dublin Bay and Blanchardstown.
War-driving is the attempt to detect Wi-Fi networks, usually from a car, either for the purpose of gaining access to the network or simply to collect data, as was the case for this research.
Over the course of the nearly 12-week study, the researchers checked routes more than once to see if changes had been instituted. "We found that on some of the routes, between three and four new access points were popping up each week, which really shows how popular the technology is becoming," said Niall Murphy, founder and senior research consultant of Enigma.
According to Murphy, when the report is published, it will show that Dublin 2 has the most access points in the city "by far," followed by Sandyford. The north half of Dublin has relatively few WLANs and even fewer were found in the city's western regions.
But more significantly, "We are doing better than the Americans in terms of security," Murphy explained. He said that of the nodes detected in the research, 38.62 percent had WEP installed as a first layer of security. Subsequent security measures were not detected since the researchers sent no packets of data for legal and privacy reasons.
Although statistics vary, it is estimated that between 22 percent and 25 percent of 802.11 networks in the US are WEP equipped. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) system is a part of a wireless network which encrypts data as it is transmitted and is generally considered the minimum level of security Wi-Fi networks should have.
"It looks like they are listening to all the warnings in the media about security," Murphy noted. He said 85 percent of the base stations detected have a non-factory installed configuration, "which shows that most of them care about security at least a little."
The report will show that Lucent and Cisco hardware is most popular in Dublin followed by Intel and 3Com units. This figure specifically is in line with research by In-Stat/MDR which shows that Cisco dominated the WLAN in 2001. In more general terms, the research follows industry trends with regard to the rapid growth in popularity of Wi-Fi, with In-Stat/MDR reporting that in 2001 WLAN hardware shipments grew by 175 percent and business WLAN unit volumes are expected to increase by 60 percent in 2002.
The Communications Network Research Institute (CNRI) is an institute of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). It was founded in July 2001 to perform pure and applied research in all aspects of communications networks and is currently the home of a Science Foundation Ireland research project into resource allocation.
Enigma Consulting, headed by Murphy, is a Dublin based firm specialising in Internet and telecommunications solutions. The firm's main business is designing and implementing Internet services.
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