t's all good, man! Thank you for the courtesy.
I've done plenty of research. I'm a Data Networks Specialist for the United States Marine Corps.
Thanks for the pleasant response (and no that's not sarcastic!) I'm all up for debating in an informed manner
Yup. Well aware of this. More than familiar with many hacking/cracking/packet tracing/packet sniffing/spoofing apps and techniques...however rusty I am with them now.
Fair play - you clearly understand the risks so that's your decision.
Very true. WPA2-PSK is about is about as good as it gets now for most basic users and it is quite tough to crack. Even still, all it takes is the right equipment, a bit of luck and time.
I will explain my reasoning behind not worrying about all this. You have all this (even a RADIUS SERVER?!!??!!?) for your home network...why? Why bother? What do you have that is so private? Why are you such a target? I'm not. I don't worry about it. I have all my files and apps installed and saved to a secure external hdd. Only thing on the computer's hdd is system files. If I get a virus or something goes wrong with windows, I don't care. I just wipe and reinstall. No problem.
The RADIUS server was a result of me messing around a couple of years back. It just works pretty nicely and as such it's stayed! It's not something I'd say that everyone neeeds to install on their home network
Incidentally, I also take the same approach as you for wiping and reinstalling if I get a virus or something similar - I agree with you there. But in my mind that's a different issue altogether. Having a virus trash my box isn't something I really care about, I can just rebuild it. Giving the outside world free access to everything inside my network? I just don't like the sound of that.
Long WPA2 keys however I would say are worth having. While I'm aware there are techniques to break these, they're few and far between, take a lot more effort than WEP or simple WPA(2) passwords and aren't always guaranteed to work. (At least that was the case last time I looked a few months back, if you know differently feel free to correct me.) If such keys slowed things down, were ridiculously difficult to set up or were somehow dangerous to set up I may well take your route of claiming they're unnecessary. However, they're easier to set up on all home routers I know of than mac address filtering, and more secure! I can see the reasoning behind your theory, but in practice why choose something that's less secure and more hassle to set up? I'm afraid you've lost me a bit there.
I think you have a bit of a false sense of security. However small the possibility of penetration may be (even though you've gone to impressively great measures to secure your network), a small possibility is still a possibility. You should really think of the bit of metal you mention as WPA/WEP/etc and RJ45 cable in conduit (or possibly even beyond THAT into the military grade crypto equipment for wired systems) as the deadbolt.
Don't get me wrong - I completley know and understand that no wireless system is completely safe. I'd take that a step further and say that even completely cabled networks aren't 100% safe either, if anyone wants to grab some information that much then they could well break into your house and physically access your network anyway!
In terms of just keeping the annoying wardrivers away and neighbours from sucking up bandwidth - I agree that for 99% of people that's all they need to worry about. That's why I use strong WPA2 keys, novice wardrivers simply won't bother (and probably wouldn't get far if they did,) they'll take on the bunch of WEP "secured" networks instead. I'm pretty sure however that even novice wardrivers could get past mac filtering and a lack of SSID broadcast.