carusoj writes "Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level. The earlier attack worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm."
I prefer to be sure that it is not safe than believe it is:)
"I'm safe. My secure wireless router is no where near Japan. There's no way they can pick up signals from me."
(This came from a guy who would only buy American electronics, because he really didn't want to watch Japanese game shows and doesn't speak Japanese, Thai. or Korean.)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: About 70% of the people in Taiwan belong to the Hoklo ethnic group and speak both Standard Mandarin (officially recognized by the ROC as the National Language) and Taiwanese Minnan (commonly known as "Taiwanese"
Mac address whitelists are a waste of time. Anyone who is competent can just monitor your network long enough to discover the mac address of a trusted device and switch his device to that address. Anyone who isn't competent isn't going to be able to bypass WPA.
If you want to get really paranoid you can back up your encryption with a non-permissive firewall that will only pass traffic for your device after you authenticate with it somehow. I used to do this back in the days when WEP was our only option. I ran my network wide open (since WEP is utterly pointless) but had a Linux box setting in front of it that refused to pass traffic unless I authenticated with it.
If you want to get creative you can program the firewall to redirect all unauthenticated http requests to goatse.cx [archive.org] instead of dropping them. That'll teach em to try and mooch off your network without permission;)
Ah - the "If you want to outrun a bear, the key is not to outrun the bear - it's to outrun the person behind you" principle. That sort of wisdom ranks up there with, "Women are like square roots - if they're under 16, you should do them in your head."
TFA lists AES. I'm curious what else is considered useful. Anybody using hacked routers to run tomato and the like are very welcome to discuss their security thoughts.
It's probably not so much a matter of what base crypto they're using (a la AES, SHA, etc) but how they're implementing the key exchange when negotiating the connection. Implement good crypto wrong and you open the door. Initial negotiations between parties is a tricky, multistep affair for good security, to prevent MITM.
When your options for your internet connection top out below 10mbps, does it matter that your LAN can only do 22? Or 144?
Yes, it matters.
It might not be needed for you, if all you use your PCs for is to use the internet, but not talk to each other heavily.
Others however have an internal autonomous network of machines that all talk to each other and only occasionally out to the internet.
Running a fileserver to play videos on your multiple entertainment PC devices on TVs, tossing large files around, running onsite+online backups... None of those things need an internet connection at all to do, yet there is a slight noticeable difference between doing them at 11mbit and doing them at 1000.
Nintendo loves the ancient concept of having games statically link the system libraries and drivers (they still do that, even for the Wii). That's the reason - each WiFi-enabled game includes a copy of the WiFi setup screen and talks directly to the hardware. They've (shortsightedly) defined the DS hardware to support WEP only, and they can't change that now without breaking existing software.
I've already ranted about this before. Basically, Nintendo has locked themselves out of practically any update or improvement on both the DS and Wii fronts. For example, they will never be able to improve upon the Wii home menu, since a copy of it is bundled with every game and they can't replace it. The only exception to this rule are the IOS drivers for Wii titles, which are upgradable, but they make up for that by using retardedly low-level interfaces for them and apparently having policies in place of never touching existing versions of IOS except for security purposes (i.e. closing exploits). This is, say, why a system-level all-game background WiiSpeak VoIP will never, ever happen.
The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7? Sometimes a bit of obscurity can go a long way. Good luck trying to sniff my shielded network cables. Yes, I've heard the tempest stories but I'm jumping to the conclusion that those techniques are only available to big $$ governements institutions and are not used by the random drive-by hacker (yet..)
The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7?
Well, yeah. That's the whole point of protocols like SSL, and tools like GPG. Though they're not magical and you need to pay attention and not blindly click "Ok" to every self-signed cert.
Yes, I've heard the tempest stories but I'm jumping to the conclusion that those techniques are only available to big $$ governements institutions and are not used by the random drive-by hacker (ye
That's not a very intelligent question. Obviously, OTP can be secure in the long term for any definition of long term. Public key cryptography has always been secure, and probably will be until really really good quantum computers are developed. Symmetric key crypto is as secure as ever, and there's no indication this will change soon. Some cryptographic hash algorithms are less useful today, but most are still more than good enough.
So, yes, crypto can certainly be "secure" in the long term. Protocols with
The original question was "The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7?" Presumably then you eventually run out of one time pads. OTP is secure iff you have either a shared source of randomness or have some other secure channel to transmit the material. And if you have a shared source of randomness you need then to have that source somehow secure. There are good reasons we don't use one time pads on a daily basis.
Doesn't work. You can't transmit this way more bits than your pad started with. So you end up with just as many bits worth of shared random data that you started with.
The Vernam-Mauborgne one-time pad was recognized early on as difficult to break, but its special status was only established by Claude Shannon some 25 years later. He proved, using information theory considerations, that the one-time pad has a property he termed perfect secrecy; that is, the ciphertext C gives absolutely no additional information about the plaintext
The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7?
Yes. It's a basic assumption in communication security that your communication medium is insecure and can be monitored or modified at will by an attacker.
You can design an authentication/key exchange protocol so that the only way to access the data is to break the encryption algorithm, or via social engineering.
You can design an encryption algorithm so that it cannot be broken excep
A perfect implementation with a mathematically secure algorithm can be broken over time.
You're absolutely right, over an arbitrary amount of time it can be broken. But you can make make mathematical statements about the average complexity of doing so. You can then get a good idea of what key size you need to make it secure in the long term for whatever definition of "long term" suits your purpose, just by making a few basic as
So, does this mean it's time to start working on whatever the replacement will be for WPA2? WPA is broken. . . but at least we can use WPA2 (for now). I'm guessing WPA2 will someday be broken, so we need to have something to replace it which has not (yet) been broken. Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
I suppose that if I could think of it, someone else already has, and already is doing it.
So, from that standpoint, even if the security researchers stay 'ahead' of the blackhats, the blackhats can still get useful info within a relatively useful amount of time. Just because you've upgraded to WPA2 or WPA+AES, doesn't mean you're completely protected, if someone snagged encrypted traffic in the past which was 'secured' by TKIP.
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
One of the parts of Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" I enjoyed the most was when one character sent another character a message encoded with, as I recall, 4096-bit security, and the character receiving it, while his computer was decoding it, went through the mental gymnastics of comparing the speed of prime factoring algorithms, taking into account Moore's Law and how many new computers were coming online, to conclude that whatever was in the message, it was meant to stay secret for at least 40 years, as opposed to the sender's usual 10 year threshold, making the recipient particularly nervous about the contents.
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
While I am not commenting on the security or lack of security in a VPN connection, I believe I can answer this. The simple fact is, most routers can't handle the encryption load of a full blown VPN, especially one with multiple users. Even dedicated routers that are made to handle this can only handle 5 or 10 at a time until you start plopping down the big bucks for the serious VPN routers.
So using VPN level of encryption on a home router is not going to happen until processing power is increased dramatically on the cheap CPUs they use.
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable?
No, and nobody ever is. Which is why security protocols are so conservatively deployed. Protocols are proposed and analyzed by lots of people who are (hopefully) much smarter than you or I. Protocols that withstand years of this scrutiny and review are slowly trusted more and more (EG: SSL) over other protocols that get picked apart. (like WEP)
If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data.
This whole paragraph makes no sense at all, and makes it clear that you do not understand encryption, especially dual-key cryptography. Please RTFM.
If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
WEP, WPA, and AES are protocols that logically establish a sort of Virtual Private Network on otherwise public radio waves. The main difference between these protocols and a true VPN is that they aren't layered on top of IP, like a VPN, but are instead layered on the datagram protocol of the radio signal itself. The problem is that WEP was quickly implemented and was never really peer reviewed. Thus, it had numerous flaws that were discovered very quickly.
From a security standpoint, WEP is sort of like locking your ground-floor window. It allows you to announce your intention of privacy, but it's quite easily compromised by somebody with the digital equivalent of the nearest rock.
That's why I don't even bother with passwords on my wireless at... Hello Friends! Please to hand over your credit and debit card informations at this time, I am thanking you not a lot. My name is Desmund Boutrous-Boutrous Gali Johnson IV and I have some news of the not so happy sort. Your uncle, and my business mentor and/or friend, McGuyver has been known to be passed away at this time going forth.
Please to send me monies by any means as possible soonest.
TKIP was fundamentally broken, by design. We knew that. TKIP was invented as an intermediate encryption that could run on the same hardware that WEP ran on. It allowed router manufacturers to use something better than WEP without having to beef-up their hardware. It worked well, and bought several years before it was completely broken. Anyone who has a router using TKIP bought at a bad time, and is stuck with something that's only a little better than WEP. The solution is to buy a router that supports WPA2, which has real AES encryption.
TKIP was fundamentally broken, by design. We knew that. TKIP was invented as an intermediate encryption that could run on the same hardware that WEP ran on.
TKIP (Timed Key Interchange Protocol, for those who don't know) does have a weak spot. This is that the new key is sent out from the access point on a regular basis. Cisco's implementation (supported by most companies that supply 802.11a equipment) makes two changes. One is that the time value set is a maximum value (the key change interval is actually random). The other is that the new key is sent via the encrypted session. You therefore have to have cracked the old key to receive the new key.
It will be interesting to see if that is discussed when the paper is presented.
MAC filters are worthless, always have been (it's trivial to change the MAC on a device to a whitelisted one). And I don't see any evidence that WPA2/AES is "fast becoming insecure", as this attack specifically doesn't work against that setup.
Cool (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
I do the same but I have a coovaAP set up for the roaming to snag free WiFi near my home.
Keeps people out of my junk, and I can limit what they can do.
Parent
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
I prefer to be sure that it is not safe than believe it is :)
"I'm safe. My secure wireless router is no where near Japan. There's no way they can pick up signals from me."
(This came from a guy who would only buy American electronics, because he really didn't want to watch Japanese game shows and doesn't speak Japanese, Thai. or Korean.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually no.
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
About 70% of the people in Taiwan belong to the Hoklo ethnic group and speak both Standard Mandarin (officially recognized by the ROC as the National Language) and Taiwanese Minnan (commonly known as "Taiwanese"
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Mac address whitelists are a waste of time. Anyone who is competent can just monitor your network long enough to discover the mac address of a trusted device and switch his device to that address. Anyone who isn't competent isn't going to be able to bypass WPA.
If you want to get really paranoid you can back up your encryption with a non-permissive firewall that will only pass traffic for your device after you authenticate with it somehow. I used to do this back in the days when WEP was our only option. I ran my network wide open (since WEP is utterly pointless) but had a Linux box setting in front of it that refused to pass traffic unless I authenticated with it.
If you want to get creative you can program the firewall to redirect all unauthenticated http requests to goatse.cx [archive.org] instead of dropping them. That'll teach em to try and mooch off your network without permission ;)
Parent
Re:How about free secure wireless? (Score:4, Interesting)
And don't forget to set them for different channels.
Alternately, if you run dd-wrt, you can try setting up mutltiple virtual wireless networks [dd-wrt.com] and have them broadcast separate SSIDs [pennock.nl] so it looks like you've got two routers.
Parent
Re:How about free secure wireless? (Score:4, Insightful)
As they say, locks are only good for honest people.
The main reason you want a strong lock is not because they're unbreakable, but because your neighbor should be the easier target.
Parent
Re:How about free secure wireless? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How about free secure wireless? (Score:5, Funny)
Take that however you will.
Parent
Wardriving? (Score:2)
A return to the old wardriving days of yore?
Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Informative)
This list [dd-wrt.com] is still accurate, if you apply the comment on #4 up to #5 as well.
And run DD-WRT.
Parent
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Informative)
It's probably not so much a matter of what base crypto they're using (a la AES, SHA, etc) but how they're implementing the key exchange when negotiating the connection. Implement good crypto wrong and you open the door. Initial negotiations between parties is a tricky, multistep affair for good security, to prevent MITM.
Parent
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wired ethernet. Not only is it vastly more secure, it's also an order of magnitude or two faster than wireless.
Parent
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Funny)
No wireless? Lame.
Parent
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:5, Informative)
When your options for your internet connection top out below 10mbps, does it matter that your LAN can only do 22? Or 144?
Yes, it matters.
It might not be needed for you, if all you use your PCs for is to use the internet, but not talk to each other heavily.
Others however have an internal autonomous network of machines that all talk to each other and only occasionally out to the internet.
Running a fileserver to play videos on your multiple entertainment PC devices on TVs, tossing large files around, running onsite+online backups... None of those things need an internet connection at all to do, yet there is a slight noticeable difference between doing them at 11mbit and doing them at 1000.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No spiders? That's madness! Who will fix the Web when it breaks?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> They do not work on...
Yet.
I'm safe. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm safe. (Score:4, Informative)
Nintendo loves the ancient concept of having games statically link the system libraries and drivers (they still do that, even for the Wii). That's the reason - each WiFi-enabled game includes a copy of the WiFi setup screen and talks directly to the hardware. They've (shortsightedly) defined the DS hardware to support WEP only, and they can't change that now without breaking existing software.
I've already ranted about this before. Basically, Nintendo has locked themselves out of practically any update or improvement on both the DS and Wii fronts. For example, they will never be able to improve upon the Wii home menu, since a copy of it is bundled with every game and they can't replace it. The only exception to this rule are the IOS drivers for Wii titles, which are upgradable, but they make up for that by using retardedly low-level interfaces for them and apparently having policies in place of never touching existing versions of IOS except for security purposes (i.e. closing exploits). This is, say, why a system-level all-game background WiiSpeak VoIP will never, ever happen.
Parent
The rat race continues.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7? Sometimes a bit of obscurity can go a long way. Good luck trying to sniff my shielded network cables. Yes, I've heard the tempest stories but I'm jumping to the conclusion that those techniques are only available to big $$ governements institutions and are not used by the random drive-by hacker (yet..)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah. That's the whole point of protocols like SSL, and tools like GPG. Though they're not magical and you need to pay attention and not blindly click "Ok" to every self-signed cert.
Re:The rat race continues.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Knowing exactly how your cables are shielded doesn't help me snoop on anything passing through those cables.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not a very intelligent question. Obviously, OTP can be secure in the long term for any definition of long term. Public key cryptography has always been secure, and probably will be until really really good quantum computers are developed. Symmetric key crypto is as secure as ever, and there's no indication this will change soon. Some cryptographic hash algorithms are less useful today, but most are still more than good enough.
So, yes, crypto can certainly be "secure" in the long term. Protocols with
Re:The rat race continues.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it is a mathematical fact that OTP is perfectly unbreakable. P=NP doesn't enter into it.
Parent
Re:The rat race continues.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or to be more specific:
Let's call the first OTP P1 and the new one P2.
We encrypt Message M1 with P1 by using M1^P1, then we send the new Pad P2 as P1^P2. Finally we send M2 encrypted with P2.
To guess a part of M2 with a known part of M1, you just do:
(M1^P1)^(P1^P2)^(P2^M2), and you get M1^(P1^P1)^(P2^P2)^M2 = M1^M2.
So each part of M1 you already know reveals a part of M2.
Re:The rat race continues.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, fer crying out loud, if you're going to use wikipedia notation, at least *check* wikipedia first [wikipedia.org]:
The Vernam-Mauborgne one-time pad was recognized early on as difficult to break, but its special status was only established by Claude Shannon some 25 years later. He proved, using information theory considerations, that the one-time pad has a property he termed perfect secrecy; that is, the ciphertext C gives absolutely no additional information about the plaintext
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The question is can anything be secure in the long term if an attacker can monitor the conversation between alice and bob 24/7?
Yes. It's a basic assumption in communication security that your communication medium is insecure and can be monitored or modified at will by an attacker.
You can design an authentication/key exchange protocol so that the only way to access the data is to break the encryption algorithm, or via social engineering.
You can design an encryption algorithm so that it cannot be broken excep
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you can't guarantee it's secure.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant.
A perfect implementation with a mathematically secure algorithm can be broken over time.
You're absolutely right, over an arbitrary amount of time it can be broken. But you can make make mathematical statements about the average complexity of doing so. You can then get a good idea of what key size you need to make it secure in the long term for whatever definition of "long term" suits your purpose, just by making a few basic as
Time to start working on WPA3? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, does this mean it's time to start working on whatever the replacement will be for WPA2? WPA is broken. . . but at least we can use WPA2 (for now). I'm guessing WPA2 will someday be broken, so we need to have something to replace it which has not (yet) been broken. Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
I suppose that if I could think of it, someone else already has, and already is doing it.
So, from that standpoint, even if the security researchers stay 'ahead' of the blackhats, the blackhats can still get useful info within a relatively useful amount of time. Just because you've upgraded to WPA2 or WPA+AES, doesn't mean you're completely protected, if someone snagged encrypted traffic in the past which was 'secured' by TKIP.
Re:Time to start working on WPA3? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
One of the parts of Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" I enjoyed the most was when one character sent another character a message encoded with, as I recall, 4096-bit security, and the character receiving it, while his computer was decoding it, went through the mental gymnastics of comparing the speed of prime factoring algorithms, taking into account Moore's Law and how many new computers were coming online, to conclude that whatever was in the message, it was meant to stay secret for at least 40 years, as opposed to the sender's usual 10 year threshold, making the recipient particularly nervous about the contents.
Parent
How does the VPN help? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
Re:How does the VPN help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
While I am not commenting on the security or lack of security in a VPN connection, I believe I can answer this. The simple fact is, most routers can't handle the encryption load of a full blown VPN, especially one with multiple users. Even dedicated routers that are made to handle this can only handle 5 or 10 at a time until you start plopping down the big bucks for the serious VPN routers.
So using VPN level of encryption on a home router is not going to happen until processing power is increased dramatically on the cheap CPUs they use.
Parent
Re:How does the VPN help? (Score:4, Informative)
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable?
No, and nobody ever is. Which is why security protocols are so conservatively deployed. Protocols are proposed and analyzed by lots of people who are (hopefully) much smarter than you or I. Protocols that withstand years of this scrutiny and review are slowly trusted more and more (EG: SSL) over other protocols that get picked apart. (like WEP)
If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data.
This whole paragraph makes no sense at all, and makes it clear that you do not understand encryption, especially dual-key cryptography. Please RTFM.
If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
WEP, WPA, and AES are protocols that logically establish a sort of Virtual Private Network on otherwise public radio waves. The main difference between these protocols and a true VPN is that they aren't layered on top of IP, like a VPN, but are instead layered on the datagram protocol of the radio signal itself. The problem is that WEP was quickly implemented and was never really peer reviewed. Thus, it had numerous flaws that were discovered very quickly.
From a security standpoint, WEP is sort of like locking your ground-floor window. It allows you to announce your intention of privacy, but it's quite easily compromised by somebody with the digital equivalent of the nearest rock.
Parent
yep.... (Score:2, Funny)
That's why I don't even bother with passwords on my wireless at ... Hello Friends! Please to hand over your credit and debit card informations at this time, I am thanking you not a lot. My name is Desmund Boutrous-Boutrous Gali Johnson IV and I have some news of the not so happy sort. Your uncle, and my business mentor and/or friend, McGuyver has been known to be passed away at this time going forth.
Please to send me monies by any means as possible soonest.
Wamerst thoughts and heated Regards, BBGIV
(that'
As usual (Score:5, Informative)
And the most important piece of information comes at the very end of the summary (just not to diminish the sensation or prevent FUD):
They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
It wasn't broken (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They've found a way to decrypt TINY packets only a few bytes long (like ARP) and inject fake ones of the same length.
So no real traffic sniffing, and definitely no WPA key recovery.
I cant see really how this would be a useful tool in aircrack as you have no way of doing anything else with the network!
I have a better security... (Score:5, Funny)
I just made my SSID "Logon for only $3.99 per minute"
Haven't ever seen my neighbors log on even once.
_
Not new (Score:5, Informative)
TKIP was fundamentally broken, by design. We knew that. TKIP was invented as an intermediate encryption that could run on the same hardware that WEP ran on. It allowed router manufacturers to use something better than WEP without having to beef-up their hardware. It worked well, and bought several years before it was completely broken. Anyone who has a router using TKIP bought at a bad time, and is stuck with something that's only a little better than WEP. The solution is to buy a router that supports WPA2, which has real AES encryption.
Other protocols available (Score:5, Informative)
TKIP (Timed Key Interchange Protocol, for those who don't know) does have a weak spot. This is that the new key is sent out from the access point on a regular basis. Cisco's implementation (supported by most companies that supply 802.11a equipment) makes two changes. One is that the time value set is a maximum value (the key change interval is actually random). The other is that the new key is sent via the encrypted session. You therefore have to have cracked the old key to receive the new key.
It will be interesting to see if that is discussed when the paper is presented.
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Re:How Long? (Score:5, Informative)
Backtrack really doesn't "do" anything, it's just an awesome integration of separate tools.
aircrack is the base package that would most probably implement this.
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Re:so, uh, (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:mac address whitelist filters? (Score:4, Informative)
MAC filters are worthless, always have been (it's trivial to change the MAC on a device to a whitelisted one). And I don't see any evidence that WPA2/AES is "fast becoming insecure", as this attack specifically doesn't work against that setup.
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