Following recent scare stories I finally took the plunge to move my home wireless lan onto WPA encryption from untrusty old WEP. Things went smoothly until I found last night that the only device to complain was my Nintendo DS which for some reason Nintendo decided only needed WEP support. Having a look around the net this seems to be an old and well covered complaint and considering Nintendo are the only true next-gen console manufacturer it looks very short-sighted from my point of view.
WEP has been insecure for years but over time this has become a bigger and bigger concern, as hardware gets faster and more clever techniques are created for breaking WEP encryption streams we are now at the point where WEP is only good for preventing people stumbling onto your network by accident, for anyone deliberately trying to gain access it has become trivial. For this reason in spite of Nintendo’s stance I will no longer be able to use my DS online because the alternative is risk my internet connectivity, which I am legally responsible for or worse, my PC data.
It would be good for Nintendo to address this problem, there must be some capacity for updating the DS firmware code, if the network drivers are stored on the DS itself, or even patching it within the games themself. I’m not an DS hardware expert, or even amature, so I can’t really speculate but there must be something that can be done to correct it. From reading blogs and forum posts about this what scares me is the number of people who are willing to compromise their own security to play their games online which in effect makes Nintendo partly responsible for problems this will inevitably cause, though not likely in a legal sense but certainly morally.
My Wii thankfully was happy with WPA so it would be nice to have the DS use the Wii to access the network by proxy if that was technically possible, there were rumours some time back that the DS would have an interface with the Wii so it can be used as a controller. This hasn’t yet come to light as far as I’m aware but it would be one cool feature!
