Create a wireless network from any outlet on your electrical system

boing
21

Well, I didn’t want to assume that you didn’t live in a third world country, but homes are typically run directly from the large transformer at the corner into homes directly. So you’d have to be on the same phase and before the transformer, which is staggeringly unlikely (unless you’re in a third world country or some rural areas where there’s less… concern about the legality of those pesky regulations).

Think of a transformer as a line cleaner, it’s taking off all the various bits of interference and transforming the larger 480 signal down to something your home can use while adding a local stabilization to the system. Between that and your house meter I doubt any of this stuff is getting out via the power lines. But again, it’s probably being radiated. If you were running any massive illegal operations the local authorities could probably park a van outside and scoop up a lot of evidence.

22

Whenever I start reading deeper on Van Eck phreaking, I go from This

To This:

To This:

And end up here pretty quickly

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23

I’ve had a trio of netlink wall-warts. They needed to be password sync-ed in order to talk to each other, and the passwords could only be set via direct ethernet. They are wonderful network extenders.

I tested them in 2 different apartment buildings, in both cases they wouldn’t link from any outlets outside my apartment, not even the hallway outlets right outside the apartment.

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24

Well, there’s strong encryption, and then there are things like WEP.

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25

Ah, I should clarify my models are not wireless. Just powerline <–> ethernet.

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Right, but suppose an attacker plugs a bug into your electrical circuit-- disguised as a power adapter, or something equally innocuous. How much computational power is required to listen in without going through the standard authentication?

27

According to the product boilerplate for the TP-Link AV600 (I already linked upthread), they use 128-bit AES encryption, with the initial authentication being a simple one-touch style mechanism where you press the pairing buttons on both the adapters, which leaves them vulnerable to an attacking third adapter for about a minute or two. Once they’re paired up and know the network’s key, all data on the wires are encrypted via AES.

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28

The reason you are talking past each other is because Michael is in Australia with 240V transformed at the city block level with great big MVA transformers, and you are presumably in North America where power is typically transformed for a small group of houses with kVA pole-pigs. Both of you are correct.

And to make this post actually informative, the way these powerline transcievers work is by looking at lots of separate frequency blocks and picking a bunch which allow lots of signal to pass, the frequency blocks may work between houses even through transformers and across phases, it all depends on the transmission line effects (particularly appropriate terminology here). Some utilities include capacitive couplings around transformers to allow the control signalling to also jump the transformers.

You can see a lot of interesting stuff going on if you couple an SDR to your power.

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29

So thats why I don’t get any invitations.

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31

Seriously though, the things they can do with Van Eck will drive you to the brink of paranoia. I mean, I don’t believe I’m being spied on any more than the next American (which is a lot, but still…), but it’s just crazy that with the right kind of antenna, and a small amount of information about your equipment (easy to get right by just guessing), they can see what’s on your monitors and going through your headphones just by sniffing the parasitic currents generated by just using your equipment.

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32

Oh, I know, but if they’re going that far already they’ve spent so much money coming after me already I’m just screwed anyway.

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33

I can field this one, as I found out exactly why not when I bought my Condo some 7 years back. It’s in a building well over 100 years old, so there’s some strangeness to the whole building (but some very nice stained glass as well).

In my case, we have a limited ability to get into the ceiling to run wire drops, because, well, upstairs neighbor. No access to an attic or anything. I have a closet where the heater is located, where the patch panel is for those antiquated phone thingies, which is where AT&T UVerse comes in. From the patch panel, there is phone lines that run through the ceiling and from there…?

You see, the previous owner fancied himself a handy-man, and among other strange things that I’m still learning to this day, he walled up all the phone jacks. It turns out, it’s non-trivial to find them. I went as far as buying a live wire finder, and hooking the phone lines up to a 9volt battery, but there’s way too many live wires in the wall to reliably make a guess as to where the wires are. Maybe someday I’ll get brave and start knocking semi-random holes in the wall in hopes of finding those, and then I will run Ethernet.

Until then, I went with a handful of 200mbs Powerline ethernet dongles. They actually work quite well for streaming HD content off my NAS to various devices in the house. What’s great about the Powerline spec is that as long as all your devices are rated for the same bandwidth, it means they are of the same protocol revision, and will talk to each other. So, I have Rocketfish talking to Netgear talking to Belkin, no problems.

As far as link layer authentication, it seems like there is something in the Powerline Ethernet spec for it:

So it’s a matter of figuring out how to configure your devices. I haven’t bothered since I’m at a much larger risk of malware coming in from the internet than neighbors. Also, all my stuff requires authentication, so even if they hopped on my network, worst case, they would steal my internet.

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34

What little I know about these things, that was what I was told the limitation was. Over too long a wiring distance the signal degrades. So its not going to head outside your house, and might not even reach your entire house (wiring dependant).

Then again the last time I played with these was back in the “Dude you got an ISDN line? I bet you can download an MP3 in like 3 hours!” “Yeah bro but these plug things I have to use make it run like a 56K!”. Pre wi-fi days, actual conversation I had with a friend. I’m actually pretty surprised these work as well as everyone is saying. Kind of pissed I opted for a wifi card in my desktop over a few of these. More expensive and the connection can be rediculously slow sometimes. Every once in a great long while it gets twitchy and I can’t stay connected. Down to walls and the rediculous number of devices we have connected.

35

I have some UK versions of these in my house. On my ones there is a button on them you have to hold down for 3 seconds. This puts it into a mode where it listens for other ones with the button pressed down, and forms a network with just these ones. This allows you to run several separate connections in the same house.

This network set-up is remembered even if the power goes off. That makes setting up a network a lot easier, as you can set it up with all the sockets in the same room, and then spread then around the house afterwards. Can you take one to another house? Perhaps, but I would expect there would be high-frequency filters where your mains came into the house to stop you polluting the common mains, so they shouldn’t get past that. The two houses on either side should be on different phases, so you would only have the earth line in common. But I haven’t tried any such shennanigans, and YMMV.

They work fine for us. The bandwidth is less than putting in a direct line from the router, but I do not notice any limit because we are probably throttled by the provider. You will get less bandwidth if you use mains extensions, instead of going straight to the plug, but I do most of my computing in my bedroom at the end of long extensions, and I don’t have any trouble. It feels significantly faster than the wireless connection that it replaced.

36

4K isn’t HD, it’s 4K (and I have a suspicion that Mark isn’t streaming 4K video, because that’s pretty niche).

But it would be good to know whether we’re talking 720p or 1080p HD streaming.

Either way even at the bottom end, an 80mb network isn’t going to have any issue with HD video, at any resolution.

37

Thanks for weighing in. Have you seen cases where neighboring houses share one cable account, if both are just using Internet and no TV services? I live in an area where a lot of people don’t bother with TV, and I don’t understand why people don’t save money by just pairing up on a single account at just one of two houses. (I already do that with garbage collection with my neighbor; we each pay the bill every other time, instead of every time.)

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38

As Daneyul says, hassle and logistics. I needed to run a connection from the bottom of my stairs to a back bedroom and figured I’d wire it up so bought a length of ethernet cable and some sockets (and relevant tools). I got the cable as far as half way up the stairs before giving up. I’d have to go under the carpet, along a wall, through a wall, along another wall and into another socket and just couldn’t be arsed.

Instead I bought a Powerline kit like this and it works flawlessly and easily. It gives a better connection than wifi with the only downside being the cost but it wasn’t outrageously expensive.

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If you use these, be sure to get a good power line conditioner for your AV equipment.

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I haven’t used this particular Trendnet kit, but I used a different one (the Trendnet TPL-406E2K kit). It’s a pair of “500AV” adapters, and I just connected a spare wifi router at the other end, turned off its dhcp functionality and it is now acting as a wifi repeater. Since I already had the spare router, it was cheaper than buying a kit with a wifi repeater on the other end. It works just fine. BUT, these adapters are VERY MUCH your-mileage-may-vary, depending on a bunch of other things:

  • the quality of the wiring in your house
  • the wiring setup between adapters (ie how the signal has to transfer between adapters - if they’re on the same circuit it’s much better than if they have to go through your main box)
  • interference from other devices (either plugged into the same outlet as the adapter, or into other outlets in the same room, or hell, even along the path between the two adapters)
  • distance between the two adapters

So, you have to take the reviews with a grain of salt.

It’s definitely easier than running ethernet in many cases, but isn’t a guaranteed fix for everyone (and certainly won’t be as fast as gigabit ethernet, which is only really an issue if you’re streaming 4k content or regularly transferring large files).

Also, something to note: the “speed ratings” on these adapters are theoretical max ratings, which you will never ever hit. Hell, many of the cheaper ones only have 10/100 ethernet ports in them (including my 500 megabit adapters), so they will NEVER hit faster than 100 megabit. They’re still handy enough though, and I use mine for streaming 1080p video (from a WD mybook live to an Android set top box) with no problem at all. I think the max speeds I’ve hit were about 80 Mbps, which exceeds my internet connection so that’s fine, and internally to the network it suffices just fine for video streaming. I don’t use them for any big file transfers, I have ethernet runs between my other devices for those purposes.

Didn’t get one, no problems in my house. YMMV again, I think.

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