Youthist wrote:It's much worse, actually. Any given MAC addresses is supposed to be unique to a single network interface card, however, all modern operating systems let you manually set a different MAC address of your choosing. All an attacker has to do is look at existing traffic in the air to determine a permitted MAC address and set his NIC to use it.
I don't encrpyt, I just hard wire the MAC addresses in my house to my router (wii, 360, 3 laptops). Not sure if its better or worse than encryption. But it works.
Even worse I think that since you don't encrypt, any attacker can easily intercept and read your traffic, apart from links with their own encryption layer such as HTTPS.
And even from a usability point of view, it's worse: if someone visits you, they need to find out and give you a long MAC address which you need to (temporarily) set to be permitted. With WPA2, all you'd need to give them is the passphrase. So yeah. Unless you have a device which doesn't work with WPA2, I'd go for that; in addition to MAC filtering if you're so inclined.
