Securing a computer's network connection over WiFi has been a problem for years. Whether its your mom, grandfather, colleagues or yourself, not everyone understands how to properly setup and use VPNs, personal firewalls and a local IDS. Even if you do understand how setup and use network security tools, it can be a mundane task to repeatedly setup if you constantly change computers or reimage regularly. SEWiFi is an open source project which aims to seamlessly provide a full security stack for WiFi connections on all operating systems.
The SEWiFi device is meant to work exactly like an off the shelf commodity USB WiFi dongle, but in reality it is running a full ARM based Linux OS behind the scenes. The SEWiFi project is currently prototyped on a WiFi enabled USB ARM Gumstix board running a Debian operating system. Future iterations of the project will run on a fully open source ARM board or a custom made open source Gumstix expansion board. The project is currently in its early stages and provides a fully configured IDS and firewall.
During this talk I will go over the current state of the project and show how to build a SEWiFi USB dongle.
Ryan Holeman (@hackgnar) resides in Austin Texas where he works as a security researcher for Ziften Technologies. He has a Masters of Science in Software Engineering. He has published papers though ICSM and ICPC and spoken at various security conferences including DEF CON and Black Hat. His spare time is mostly spent digging into various network protocols and shredding local skateparks.