Killer iPhones and their rays of death

Imagine: one day your company-wide wireless LAN starts to break down. Individual nodes stop responding to connection or management requests; others struggle to maintain a fraction of their normal throughput. Yet take one offline and reset it, and it's right as rain. You're under attack from the air.

That's the problem facing the system admins at Duke University in North Carolina. While they haven't found a fix, they've found the culprit — the Apple iPhone. It has a habit of trying to call the last wireless gateway it heard even when it's moved out of range; when it doesn't get a reply, it jams the airwaves with plaintive cries for attention. With 150 iPhones already nestling in jacket pockets during the summer vacation, the challenge is on to find a fix before term starts and the network stops.

This is the first salvo in another front of the eternal battle. It used to be that by outlawing illicit USB devices, supporting only a small number of wireless devices and keeping software and policies up to date, network managers could be reasonably sure of limiting the damage that their users could cause. Now we have better batteries and more abstemious radio circuits, Wi-Fi is going to appear in more and more portable consumer products. And if Apple can make something with such incontinent habits, what'll happen when those with less commitment to detail start shipping?

A blanket ban on wireless goodies would be unenforceable and unthinkable. A policy of preparation, co-operation and containment is the best that can be done: let users know that certain kinds of gizmo can cause problems, what the symptoms might be and what to do if it happens. Meanwhile, get a wireless sniffer and learn how to use it.

More importantly, get used to the idea that convergence between enterprise and consumer technology will continue, and that, as we get more wireless, more adaptive and more connected, these clashes of culture will become more and more common. The days when the outside world stopped at the factory gate went with the gate itself.

It's not all bad news. Forewarned is forearmed: online catalogues are full of gadgets crying out for proper security assessment on the departmental dime. This is one cloud with a distinctly chrome-plated lining.

Update: Duke University and Cisco subsequently announced that the problems the University experienced were down to an issue with a Cisco router and not iPhones. The wider issues addressed in this piece however are still relevant.