The final standard simply confirms what's been shipping in the market in largely unchanged form for over two years. The Wi-Fi Alliance has been certifying devices against a stable draft since 2007. There's no such thing as "pre-standard" devices in this category. Either they have a Wi-Fi seal for Draft N or they don't.
Sorry, I didn't properly include the link.
My analysis about how the 802.11n stuff works related to an iPod touch, such as explaining what single-stream 802.11n means as a media server is here at TidBITS. The iFixIt tear down is here.
I've looked through the comments, and I cannot tell whether anyone has read the paper linked or is commenting on the summary. The summary, derived from news coverage, is incorrect.
The exploit works only to recover a single MIC encryption key which is distinct for each packet. It allows a packet intended for a client to be falsified, but the packet has to be short and mostly known, like an ARP packet. The researchers require that they act as a physical man in the middle, as a relay between an access point and a client, where the client cannot receive signals from the access point.
It's very clever, but it doesn't involve breaking TKIP per se; it has nothing to do with key recovery for network encryption.
TidBITS system guy here. Sorry for the troubles. We had a glitch in our Apache min/max/spare/etc settings that was triggered for the first time by Slashdot traffic. (A combination of a new method to zoom images and AJAX produced a very high set of spawned children for each new visitor.)
This is a funny day at Slashdot. +3 guffaw points.
Actually, I was thinking chalcogenide could be a good new name for a mixed drink. Maybe grenadine, liquid oxygen, and something fizzy.
Okay, I'm the author of the Ars Technica piece, and that make me laugh.
Talking to the researcher, Eggleton, made my head slightly explode, because he's looking 5 to 20 years into the future with the research he's on top of today.
But they have practical devices that show that the stuff can be hand-built, and that's what blows my mind.
The future isn't in plastics -- it's in glass!
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
