Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
Brian,
I did not acknowledge that there is an issue with the A ver of the 1522. The problem is an interaction of the firmware loaded on the Cisco router to fix another problem noted earlier in the season when used with A version. It was discovered in testing after St. Louis that the Cisco firmware and the Dlink AP were affected when used together. Please read page 7 and 8 of the report. Please note that the report also states that this updated firmware was only installed at week four events. That being said, a user testing with wifi devices at their home field could not have discovered this vulnerability. In addition, it could only be discovered at an event using a 5GHz enabled wifi device of which, until recently, there were limited numbers of such devices available.
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I understand completely I read the report. The issue remains that I distinctly remember people telling me they had some unspecified issues with the 1522 version A weeks before Einstein. In fact I have 25's A version 1522 which they thought was intermittent and it's not and they replaced that before they arrived at the championships. That could mean that someone was messing with them or not (all depends on the other factors).
So this means that people had a place to start looking weeks before Einstein. Whether they could find the specific interaction as you said would require a Cisco unit with that firmware (and very few people knew that information). I suppose one could take from that they discovered this by messing with other fields (who knows when or how).
It seems from what I've seen that this person was sure they had something (which is sort of damning).
I was never able to find anything extremely unusual about this 1522 I got from them. So it fits that you'd need this and some external set of factors that do not exist in my environment but do exist on the actual field. Course I can only rely on the information I was told that nothing besides this AP was changed to remedy the issue (otherwise one could argue that something was an issue in their robot as additional stimulus and had changed by the time you reviewed it for this report).
The only way I can think of that someone could have stumbled on this without effecting a field would be to have exactly what's on the field. This seems unlikely given the way Cisco handles firmware and we know the version of firmware matters. That or perhaps they could have compared the 2 versions of the D-Link 1522 AP noticed a change in the behavior which points to the soft spot.
Obviously attacking the field till you find it would be easier and in this case require less technical skill and resources. Course that would almost certainly mean that whoever insisted on bringing this forward had already done something they shouldn't or seen someone else do it.