Noel Anderson and Taroon Mandhana: WiFi in Windows Vista: A Peek Inside the Kimono

Windows Vista comes with redesigned support for WiFi (802.11 wireless). For those of us who live with a laptop in easy reach, it’s going to have an effect on our workday. For users there’s a new UI experience, helpful diagnostics and updated default behaviors. For IT pros who manage Windows clients, there’s improved management via Group Policy and Scripting. For sysadmins & geeks there’s a new command line interface. But behind these more obvious changes there’s a new software stack. A stack designed to be more secure, but also more open and extensible. This talk will take a deep dive into that stack, describe the various components and their interaction and show where developers can create code to modify and extend the client. Want to build a site survey tool, a wireless IDS, or hack your own driver? We’ll show where to plug in. We’ll describe in detail how the behavior of the wireless stack has changed from XP, explain the rational behind this, and show how this is reflected in the user experience. Finally we’ll look at how Microsoft tests WiFi in Windows Vista."