OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD the basis of a WiFi appliance

Contributed by jose on from the WiFi dept.

The AirLok Model 540 appliance was recently used at a major WiFi event. The AirLock uses OpenBSD as its foundation:

http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/news/2003/dec/03/news5.html

A quote from the story:

"During the three days of the conference attendees subjected the AirLok to strenuous use and focused penetration and security attacks. The AirLok Appliance performed without interruption or incident. Separately, the operating system that is the foundation of the AirLok Appliance - OpenBSD - has successfully sustained more than two million black-hat hacking attacks over the past three years."

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By PCronin () pcronin@nospam.bigfoor.com.nospam on mailto:pcronin@nospam.bigfoor.com.nospam

    We all know that Linksys has been using a modified Linux 2.4 kernel in it's WAPs for some time now. It's great to see someone using OpenBSD for this type of project. It might even make vendors more willing to port drivers ;-)$

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      OpenBSD seems to be better for the job than Linux, because of OpenBSD's focus on security, and great IPsec possiilities.

      But then again, OpenBSD lacks Linux's hype (and that's a GOOD thing imho), and hype is the one thing that sells to management people...

      Comments
      1. By Juanjo () on

        OpenBSD cannot work as repeater due it doesn't support WDS.

        That's a problem IMHO if you wanna OpenBSD inside an AP :(

        I had to move to Linux in a Wireless 802.11b AP due to this. Until I need WDS OpenBSD did the work OK, duh.

  2. By Bruce () on

    This isn't a story, it is a press release. No big deal, just a clarification.

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on


    I don't doubt that OpenBSD is a target for black-hats (and white-hats) to attack, if for nothing else, pure prestige. But where the hell did they get that number of 2 million attacks?


    Guess it just goes to show that 90% of statistics are made up on the spot :p

    Comments
    1. By Dom De Vitto () on

      96%.

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      One can prove anything with statistics. 60% of people know that :)

  4. By Ken Simpson () on http://ttul.org/~ksimpson

    I founded a WiFi service provider a couple of years ago called FatPort (www.fatport.com). We based our embedded WiFi gateway on OpenBSD 3.0, later upgrading "on the fly" to OpenBSD 3.1 and 3.2.

    We based our build system on the flashdist package and made various hacks to the hostap drivers to get it to work with late breaking things like the Apple Airport Extreme and Intel Centrino clients.

    The pf package rocked for this application. I also found OpenBSD's simplicity made it easy to work with (and to further simplify so that it could all fit in under 32MB).

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