Talk:Service set identifier
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HOW CAN WE KNOW THE SSID NUMBER?
- Ussually you're wireless conection software will tell you (Look for SSID:, Network name:, or Conected to:) Bawolff 03:34, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I've been looking for a reference for allowable encodings for an SSID. The wording "alphanumeric string" (vaguely) implies 7-bit ASCII only, but 8-bit SSIDs are certainly out there; I have found a bug report which mentions in passing that the encoding should be ISO-8859-1 but this seems rather anachronistic for a standard from 1999. Couldn't find anything in the 802.11 specs via http://ieee802.org/ either. era 15:17, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
The article says "it [the SSID] is however still readily available to crackers using the appropriate tools"
Some more dicussion how how a "cracker" would do this would be nice to have (i.e. what can you tell about a network if you don't know the SSID, and how do you connect to it? do you need to eavesdrop on other connections, or can you get in some other way?) --85.119.130.132 12:10, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, you could use a tool such as essid_jack. When you have the MAC address of an AP that your target is connected to (obtained by a packet sniffer), essid_jack to spoofs your MAC address with the one of the AP and sends a disassociate frame to your target (or targets, if the destination is set to broadcast) which causes them to send back to the AP (you) an associate frame, with, of course, the SSID. Or if you like doing it passively, simply capture packets until one of them has the SSID you need. Easy. SeriousWorm 13:47, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
References for the "many security experts considering disabling SSID broadcast to be a security weakness" part would greatly benefit this article. Jody Burns 22:12, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be clearer to spell it with a hyphen: "service-set identifier"? Reason: it seems to be `an identifier set by the service`, i.e., by the network (its provider or the processes going on in the network).
