WPA Encryption Cracked In 60 Seconds 322
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."
Secure protocols for home wifi? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
TKIP | AES (Score:1, Interesting)
So, TKIP broken, not AES. Wonder if the WEP AES implementation is broken somehow ?
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.
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: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.
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.
Re:Cool (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"