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iWatch wi-fi only under MacAdress filter: i have to add it?
- Thread starter lucco78
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Yes, but you'd be much better off switching to real security. Mac address filtering is very easy to bypass, you just have to sniff the network for a valid one and then wait for it to drop off the network and use it with your device.
If you are at home, you should just WPA2 with a long pass phrase -- I use a sentence that I can easily remember and tell guests. At work you should use WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TLS -- I have not tested this with the Apple Watch, it may only support regular WPA2.
If you are at home, you should just WPA2 with a long pass phrase -- I use a sentence that I can easily remember and tell guests. At work you should use WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TLS -- I have not tested this with the Apple Watch, it may only support regular WPA2.
I don't think the OP was looking for a lesson in security. He was just wondering if he needed to add the watch to the whitelist. The answer to that of course is yes.
Actually, the answer to that is "it depends"... Is there really a need to get the Apple Watch on the WiFi network? If you'll be within bluetooth range of your phone all day, then the answer is no. It's not really necessary. It's only necessary if you really need the watch to be WiFi connected while you're there.
Oddly enough my watch connects to wifi even if it's in bt range. I haven't bothered to figure out why yet.
It connects to WiFi because it can... Data transfer over WiFi will be faster than BT. It doesn't need to, however.
How can you sniff the network if you cant get on the network to begin with. Cart before the horse'd.
You can sniff anything that is in the air, you don't need to be part of the network to observe it's traffic. If the packet is encrypted with WPA then you would have to decrypt it first to see the MAC address. So that is where the real security is, once the packet is unencrypted, finding a valid MAC is trivial -- perhaps not practical if you can't wait for a host to stop using a valid address.
In other words, MAC filtering makes the network much less useable, without making it much more secure and all security is a balance between usable and secure.
You can easily sniff the network without being connected to it. The signals are going through the air.
MAC filtering is a hacker's dream as it essentially provides no security whatsoever but fools people into thinking they are protected. Muhhaha.
For OP, does your work have a 2.4G wifi network? Just be aware that the watch can't use 5G, so don't bother adding it if that's all they support. You'll be wondering why it doesn't connect.
(And there are issues if they support 2.4G/5G with the same SSID as well, so you may be better off leaving it off wifi until Apple addresses that.)
(And there are issues if they support 2.4G/5G with the same SSID as well, so you may be better off leaving it off wifi until Apple addresses that.)
Not entirely certain Apple will address that (the iPhone storing a SSID as a 5GHz network).
OP, if you have any connections in IT, see if they can't segregate your iPhone to 2.4GHz networks only. That will keep both of them on the SSID's that are usable.
I suspect only they can though. If you have different SSIDs for 2.4G networks and 5G networks, it's easy to switch your phone to the 2.4G. But if not, there doesn't seem to be a way to move the iphone or the watch to the supported network. The phone could do this though, checking that both 2.4G and 5G are available when it attaches. (I assume it currently jumps to the assumed, faster, 5G. As this seems to be the case of a number of trouble reports with Apple Watch connection problems.)
I really think it's a bug, as the Watch could connect to the 2.4G network with the credentials it already has, and the iphone could stay on the 5G network. This doesn't work presently unless you force it to learn that setup manually.
Yeah, I got thinking about this again. The "quick fix" may be just having the watch wifi stack ignore the hidden frequency parameter in the data it gets from the iPhone. (they'll also need to keep this behaviour tied to the 1.0 watches - as we'll likely get a 5GHz AC capable radio in v2....provided they can fit the antennae in the small footprint that is).