New Wireless Security Standard Has Old Problem?

eggboard writes "Wireless security expert Robert Moskowitz, who sits on IEEE and IETF committees on that subject, sent me a short paper on a glaring weakness in the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol that's replacing the weak and broken WEP system well discussed here at Slashdot. His paper, which I've posted here, proves definitively that while WPA itself remains robust and secure, the interface for choosing consumer passwords makes it simple to snarf a tiny bit of network traffic and perform an offline dictionary attack. For Slashdot readers, this probably seems trivial, but because Linksys, Apple, and others are letting users enter My Dog Has Fleas as their passphrase, WPA might be less secure for home users than WEP."

Comments

Oh, thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to tell everybody my password.

Man, now I have to change it.

Re:Oh, thanks.

[crazysim]

Theres a password on Anonymous Coward?

Re:Oh, thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

The root password to a rather important machine on my campus used to be "cat dog goat" ;)

Re:Oh, thanks.

[orthogonal]

The root password to a rather important machine on my campus used to be "cat dog goat" ;)

Chinese guy, right?

I've noriced that Chinese people do often use for their passwords the names of their favorite dishes.

Re:Oh, thanks.

[interiot]

One! (one)
Two! (two)
Three! (three)
Four! (four)

Five! (five)

That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.

Re:Oh, thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that's my client card pass number.

Re:Oh, thanks.

[foniksonik]

Change it to:

"Now I Have Fleas" dohh! sorry if I gave out your new password....

Re:Oh, thanks.

[thoughtcrime]

actually, that IS the password for the public-use accounts on my wireless points. i figure if the guy on the street doesn't understand "the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage" as a password hint, he's unworthy of having access to my network.

Re:Oh, thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to tell everybody my password.

Man, now I have to change it.

Not to mention the damage you've done to his dog's social life...

My Dog Has Fleas?

[Trillan]

My Dog Has Fleas is a positively fantasic password compared to the usual choice of a middle name, spouse's name, child's name or birthdate.

Or, of course, the infamous "password."

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Tumbleweed]

Yeah, but what if your does doesn't HAVE fleas? Or if you don't even have a dog? Then your security is based on nothing but LIES! And how secure can THAT be? Think before you ask these questions, Mitch.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I will stay anonymous to make this question/point - what is the matter with challenge response ciphers and all that sort of stuff? Perhaps that is still vulnerable to this attack but it wouldnt seem as though it is ....

Ie - I thought we all knew any access to a password - be it encrypted or not - was potentially unsecure, and thus /etc/shadow was born, and thusly why ssh uses diffe-helman etc. What gives .. I havent thought of this problem so much but perhaps Access Control is required to secure these damned things, and so what if it is? At the very least it could offer a 3rd option - wide-open, WEP/xxx, ACL...

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[DeltaSigma]

What is this infamous "password?"

Everyone's always talking about it, but noone will ever tell me!

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[sweetooth]

That's because it's a "secret"

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Trillan]

A study a year or so back indicated that the most popular choice for a password is, in fact, the word password.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[IM6100]

Something that amused me recently was when I installed IRIX on a cool SGI box I bought at auction.

It refused to let me use a password longer than 8 characters.

I am talking about a release of IRIX that was pressed to CD in the year 2002.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[stefanlasiewski]

My Dog Has Fleas is a positively fantasic password compared to the usual choice of a middle name, spouse's name, child's name or birthdate.

Well, not really.

Using your child's name for a password is a million times more secure then posting it on Slashdot :)

And with the Slasdot crowd, maybe someone really does have a kid named "j3Nn!f3r". What could be more secure then that? It's so secure that those poor kindergarteners can't even pronounce it!!!

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[DraKKon]

I kinda like the password of 'pass' myself...

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Trillan]

Similiar problem with a Windows 2000 server using Services for Macintosh. Microsoft uses an old authentication model which doesn't support long passwords... unless you install Microsoft's client-side authentication model, which is too buggy to use (i.e. authentication windows pop up BELOW everything else).

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[jamesh]

'My Dog Has Fleas' is indeed fantastic. I'm changing all my passwords to that right now. I encourage you all to do the same.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Trillan]

You've reached new heights (or lows?) of laziness. :)

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Chops]

Once I noticed that an acquaintance of mine's Win2k machine had no password on the "Administrator" account. I began to lecture him on the dangers of SMB, C$, and such, and the fact that his machine was basically freely usable by anyone who had (a) the internet and (b) some semblance of clue and maliciousness.

He laughed and said, "Yeah, but who would think that the administrator account wouldn't have a password?"

I gave up and said no more.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[burns210]

how about: love, god or sex? sound pretty secure to me!

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[weileong]

default Solaris8 won't take more than 8, either. neither will the older versions of MacOS X (Puma, Jaguar. Panther has this fixed, though).

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[God! Awful 2]

He laughed and said, "Yeah, but who would think that the administrator account wouldn't have a password?"

Maybe it sets off alarm bells if you type it in wrong the first time...

-a

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[God! Awful 2]

Or, of course, the infamous "password."

Keyword being "infamous". And look at the title of the article: "New Wireless Security Standard Has Old Problem?" In other words, this ain't exactly front page news.

-a

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Yehtmae]

And with the Slasdot crowd, maybe someone really does have a kid named "j3Nn!f3r". What could be more secure then that? It's so secure that those poor kindergarteners can't even pronounce it!!! Yeah right, you seriously imagine that slashdot readers are ever going to have the opportunity to reproduce and have kids? :)

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have it set up so the Administrator account didn't have a password. Of course Administrator wasn't actually an administrator, just a very limited guest account.

But then the hard drive died, so that's all gone now.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[lordrich]

Not if you have to stick it to your monitor in order to remember it.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[H8X55]

or my personal fave, under the keyboard. on my network, of 50+ users, on any given day i can find a few passwords, written on a stickey note, under a keyboard.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Permission Denied]

It refused to let me use a password longer than 8 characters.

Likely that IRIX still uses getpass(3) in some places with the max length defined to 8. Solaris 8 does this too (don't know about Solaris 9).

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has any1 seen wargames???? People are still st00pid!

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[DraKKon]

Oh, I never use it as a password... but I know of a company that uses it as the default for everything... until I find out and kick their ass into changing it to at LEAST 8 characters of miXeD case $ymb*l$ and numb3r5..

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[Trillan]

I was just teasing, man...

But hearing you actually worked with people who did that is kind of scary.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas?

[DraKKon]

oh.. its extremely scary..

Some security is better than no security

[Dancin_Santa]

If all it took were a dictionary attack to sniff a password, at least it took that much.

This isn't some simple passthrough that can be gotten through by knowing a couple backdoor passwords, it's a real live algorithm.

But in the end, it's up to the user to enter a password and as long as humans remain humans easy to remember passwords will always be chosen over #HrS2sWmNw/()LggDwMn.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Carnildo]

In general, if someone has the ability to run a dictionary attack on a password, it's as good as giving them access. From personal experience as a sysadmin, 65%-75%(1) of all passwords can be found by a dictionary attack.

(1) From running dictionary attacks against three sets of passwords.
Computer science students: 75%
Public forum #1: 65%
Public forum #2: 75%

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Minderbinder106]

You wouldn't believe all the people at my school who have shared drives with read/write access that use the username guest and the password guest.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Anonymous Coward]

I used worked for a porn site that had about 200,000 registered users. The passwords were stored in plain text in the DB. Once, I selected out the top ten most common passwords. The top ten accounted for 35% or 45% (can't remember which it was) of the passwords. 'password' was #1. 1234 and 12345 were also in the top ten.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes the Spaceballs Presidents luggage seem secure.

Along with Druidia's air.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Minna Kirai]

But that's no security violation. If someone wants to run the equivalent of an anonymous FTP server, let him. (I assume these are on separate disks than the main OS install, right?)

Occasionally in the lose college environment like that, you find students leaving text files on other people harddrives, things like "Hey I like your MP3s, where do you live? I'm in Kenmore 402!", because they find shares but have no knowledge of the owner.

PS. What I don't believe is the number of administrators at your school collecting $1,800,000 severance after zero days of work!

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone waste a good password on a porn site? Considering the password doesn't control access to anything personal, I'd probably use a simple one too.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Anonymous Coward]

#HrS2sWmNw/()LggDwMn

That's not random!

Re:Some security is better than no security

[Minna Kirai]

For those who don't know...

Re:Some security is better than no security

[keith.bronstrup.com]

like WTF d00d! 1 d0n'7 w4n7 @ 8un(# 0f p33pz in my pr1v473 1R( (#4nn3l! That's not a password, man, that's an IRC channel. drop the pound sign and it might be a password.

Re:Some security is better than no security

[bensagenius]

ahem, for the record: "I ALSO would not make a good fit as President of Boston College." May I have my check now, please?

At least use WEP!

[jolyonr]

It doesn't matter how easy to break a new system is, it's better than having no security.

I recently took my laptop on a trip across Toronto and in a couple of hours spotted around 60 wireless networks. Around 80% had NO encryption enabled at all. And yes, the most common SSIDs are 'default' and 'linksys'.

So make a system more complex and people won't use it - which defeats the whole object of it.

Jolyon

Re:At least use WEP!

[Xerithane]

I recently took my laptop on a trip across Toronto and in a couple of hours spotted around 60 wireless networks. Around 80% had NO encryption enabled at all. And yes, the most common SSIDs are 'default' and 'linksys'.


How many of those were open intentionally? Probably quite a few. I don't leave the default SSID on, just so they can get an idea where they are connecting to, but I leave my access point open. It's on a different network segment, and I figure if someone has an 802.11 card I'll help out with their bandwidth. If it ever becomes a problem on my bandwidth, I'll just regulate that segment.

Don't assume that because they are open without encryption it is due to naivity.

Re:At least use WEP!

[floodo1]

yeah word up, thats exactly why my wap is wide open...if you're in my neighborhood hook it up!

Re:At least use WEP!

[WuphonsReach]

We don't use WEP on our wireless net at the office. Too often, the interaction between the card and the access-point doesn't work well if WEP is enabled (different vendors for the two products).

Instead, we've segregated all of the WAPs onto a dead-end network where the users have to VPN into our LAN through a border server. (Basically treating them as if they were outside the office and coming in from an external ISP.)

Works pretty well, other then having to remember to VPN into the network. The traffic ends up encrypted (inside of the VPN tunnel), so it's not possible to sniff passwords.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Rascasse]

Here in the cafes in Toronto where I use my iBook, WEP isn't enabled on the pay-as-you-go wireless Internet services. But that doesn't mean I'm vulnerable. I setup my Linux box at home to act as a VPN gateway and the first thing I do after connecting to the hotspot is connect to my VPN and do my Internet surfing indirectly from home.

Re:At least use WEP!

[mcrbids]

I leave my access point open. It's on a different network segment, and I figure if someone has an 802.11 card I'll help out with their bandwidth. If it ever becomes a problem on my bandwidth, I'll just regulate that segment.

A classic case of altruism meets real-world. Contributing your bandwidth is all fine and dandy until some jerk uses it to send bomb threats to the president. Or send all kinds of incriminating pseudo-spam that makes you look very bad.

Perhaps a picture of some guy's backside with the wording "A little love from us at nerd farm!" in big, yellow letters.

And, looking at the email headers shows that it did, in fact, come from YOUR network segment...

I'd suggest a bit of security-consciousness goes a *long* way...

Re:At least use WEP!

[morcheeba]

I do that, too (hi neighbors who are sniffing my packets!), but I worry that my laptop is behind my firewall and that it's open to hacking... I really want a hardware firewall, but it wouldn't be feasible to sticking it on with doublesided tape to the back of my screen - kinda defeats the whole portability benefit.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Xerithane]

And, looking at the email headers shows that it did, in fact, come from YOUR network segment...

First, it's not anything related to nerdfarm. Second, what makes you think I don't have any security in place on top of that? Such as filtering port 25, and only allowing ssh and http, https?

It's not altruism, it's just not being a dick.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Anonymous Coward]

I liken WEP to the Club. It's a deterrent. Most casual thiefs can defeat the Club. But why should they bother when 95% of cars don't have them? (Unless the car is a Lexus, but that's beside the point.)

Most people who are just out casually wardriving are going to drive right by a locked network and hit one of the other 15 that are open.

And if your firmware allows it...

• Turn of SSID broadcasting (I have read some articles that say not to do this, but I've yet to find a good reason not to. But if shutting off your SSID breaks something, then I guess you'll have to keep it on.)
  
• Lower the radio signal power to a level that isn't broadcasting any farther than is necessary. If you have a good solid signal at half power, it's not going to make your downloads any faster by having the power all the way up. But if you start dropping connection, then you might have to turn the signal up.
  
• Change all the default WAP settings such as the admin password (and name if possible), disable the guest account if one exists or at least change the password.
  
• Don't use meaningful names like "DL614" - in a personal wardriving experiment I was able to look up the default admin name/password/default IP for the router on a WAP because the guy used the manufacturer name and model # as his SSID.
  
• MAC address filtering
  

Go into the firmware and shut off the radio broadcast if you're not going to be using your wireless for some length of time. I wish manufacturers would include a radio shut off scheduler like some do for Internet traffic. So you could have your wireless radio broadcast automatically physically shut off at night and automatically come back on at 8 a.m. And a manual switch on the front of the WAP would be cool too since mine sits on my desk. I'd flip the switch to shut off the radio if I was going to leave for a while.

I'm probably forgetting a few things but those tips should help.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Malor]

I f you have a Linux firewall, just add another network card and move the wireless traffic off onto its own segment. Tunnel the laptop to either the firewall or a desktop machine behind it; one easy way is by running squid on a Linux box, connecting to it with SSH, and routing local port 3128 to remote port 3128. Then configure IE to use 127.0.0.1:3128 as your proxy port. Disallow all traffic except SSH to your LInux server, make sure you run a firewall on your laptop, and disallow wireless administration of the access point. This should give you a fairly secure wireless network.

If you need additional services, you can tunnel those too; ssh can do it for free via Cygwin, but it takes a little time to set up. (each port requires a separate ssh command; you can script them if you always need several). You can also use a payware program like SecureCRT to forward multiple ports with a nice GUI interface.

With this kind of setup, WEP becomes essentially irrelevant. In fact, it may be a detriment, simply because you may get sloppy about not setting up your tunnels if you think maybe you're not being watched.

You can also do IPSEC, which will work with anything and won't require specific tunneled ports, but that's a lot more complex. SSH is simple, fast, easy, and pretty secure.

Re:At least use WEP!

[j h woodyatt]

"At least use WEP?"

That's not really great advice. If you can use WPA w/EAPOL, then use WPA w/EAPOL. If you can't be bothered to run an authorization server (or you don't know what that is), then use WPA w/PSK (pre-shared key).

Robert Moskowitz is telling us that securing a network with a poorly-chosen shared secret is a bad idea, because dictionary attacks are easy to mount. If your WEP key is an ASCII string of characters spelling out the word "PEANUT" then you're just as vulnerable (if not more) than if you had used that secret as your WPA pre-shared key passphrase.

Why? Because, in addition to the well-known weakness of WEP, it's also the case that an offline dictionary attack might succeed sooner. Just snarf a pile of WEP-encrypted frames and mount a dictionary attack on the raw WEP key used to encrypt the IP headers.

And if the access point is an Apple AirPort Base Station, then the WEP key is actually most likely the product of a hash function (one not widely published, but it's no secret). That's only a little speedbump.

The problem has always been there. It isn't getting any worse with WPA pre-shared key. If you can upgrade to WPA, you have no good reason to stick with WEP other than you're lazy. (Don't get me wrong-- lazy can be a perfectly good reason.)

And if you're a network administrator, and you care deeply about wireless security, because-- I don't know-- you're on contract to the U.S. Department of Homeland Paranoia, then install a RADIUS server and run WPA w/EAPOL. And spend the extra $49.95 per station for the hardware upgrade to support AES rather than TKIP. All your deepest fears should be ameliorated by this.

--

Re:At least use WEP!

[Mariner77]

Got my SSH baby! Don't need no wireless password.

Re:At least use WEP!

[mobets]

ssh can do it for free via Cygwin

What's wrong with Putty?
It's free and a heck of a lot smaller than Cygwin.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Malor]

Well, if it does port forwarding, why not? I haven't looked at it in ages, I use SecureCRT on Windows, but that's a good idea.

One reason to go ahead and use Cygwin is the Socks 4 proxy mode in OpenSSH. I didn't get into that in the first message because I haven't used it much and can't be as specific about my instructions, but from what I understand, you can tunnel any Socks-4 aware application through SSH by using this option. (I think it's invoked with -D ... search the man page.) You connect locally and the connections are initiated from the remote host. On OSX, this is especially useful, because there's an OS-level setting for proxies that applications are supposed to use automatically. (I don't know whether or not they actually do, yet... I believe that's a new feature in Panther.) On Windows and Linux, you have to do manual configuration still.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Anonymous Coward]

how about no security so people can use your wireless
access to connect to the internet?

if you've got a wireless device, wouldn't you hope others do the same, so when your by their place, it'd just work?

That'd piss off some ISP's probably, but it'd be awesome to have good wireless coverage..

Re:At least use WEP!

[jandrese]

Lower the radio signal power to a level that isn't broadcasting any farther than is necessary. If you have a good solid signal at half power, it's not going to make your downloads any faster by having the power all the way up. But if you start dropping connection, then you might have to turn the signal up.

Are you sure you know what you're talking about? Besides the fact that most 802.11b cards and APs don't support this, it will actually slow down your connections in real life. 802.11b has four "modes" which it chooses based on the signal strength: 11mb, 5.5mb, 2mb, and 1mb. If you somehow limit your cards down to the point where you're getting 50% signal strength, then you'll be down in the 2 to 5.5mb range, and whats worse, you're killing any safety margin you had on the signal (it will drop down to 1mb and may drop out as you move around). If you're getting drops, then even when the network is working you're going to get lousy transfer rates.

Re:At least use WEP!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you somehow limit your cards down to the point where you're getting 50% signal strength

Did you read what I wrote? Here it is again "If you have a good solid signal" (i.e. all your signal strength bars are maxed out)

Besides the fact that most 802.11b cards and APs don't support this

Did you read what I wrote? Here it is again "if your firmware allows it..."

If you're getting drops, then even when the network is working you're going to get lousy transfer rates.

Did you read what I wrote? Here it is again "if you start dropping connection, then you might have to turn the signal up."

Re:At least use WEP!

[Dudio]

But they still can send death threats and such via Hotmail, whose X-Originating-Ip: header would lead investigating authorities straight to your door.

There will always be stupid users...

[mackman]

The important thing here is that this allows for actual security for users smart enough to use good passwords. Even in hex users can enter dumb passwords ("AA AA AA AA AA...").

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if your password is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ?

Wouldn't that be tough to crack?

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your left pinky would crack first...

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[pegr]

Nah, my fav hex password? 042CDEADBEEF It's my MAC address too!

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is BEEF00FA66O1

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[LearnToSpell]

DEADBEEFF00D is a good one. Actually, if you do something like grep -iv [ghjkmnpqru-z] /usr/shareorwhatevah/words, you can get a decent list (4300-ish), with typical leeto substitutions ('5' for 'S' etc.).
C00170551CA7EDC011EC7AB1E5

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[HermanAB]

Well depends on your inclination. How about C00lDEADBABE...

Re:There will always be stupid users...

[sklib]

Let's not forget the venerable 0xfeedface

Big deal

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Just about any protocol allows dictionary attacks. Whilst some techniques, like salt, help, ultimately they make the problem for the bad guys only slightly harder.

Only long passwords and encouraging the users to use good quality passwords/phrases really helps.

Ultimately though, these passphrases are flawed anyway- they are a form of shared password. History has shown this to be a thoroughly bad idea, one passphrase per user/machine is a far better idea; and even the user shouldn't know what it is (that way it can't get beaten out of them- black cosh crytography works pretty darn well.) These standards organisations aren't even trying.

Re:Big deal

[timeOday]

Ultimately though, these passphrases are flawed anyway- they are a form of shared password. History has shown this to be a thoroughly bad idea, one passphrase per user/machine is a far better idea... These standards organisations aren't even trying.

Well, the second sentence in the article does say that the standard provides for each MAC address to be given a different key. In fact it's called a "Pairwise Master Key."

passphrases kick password ass

[cheezus]

yeah, but #HrS2sWmNw/()LggDwMn.
is easier to crack than
"I bought 2 bags of frozen peas at the store"
which is much easier to remember

Re:passphrases kick password ass

[Muerte23]

actually, your passphrase has much lower entropy than your random password. assuming there are about 10K words in common vocabulary, and you use 10 words, that's about 10,000^10. pretty large, but only about 23 bits. now consider the deterministic ordering of words in an english sentence, and you knock off a few more bits.

but your 20 character password has a huge entropy. you have 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 numbers and about 10 punctuation marks. that's 66 possibilities per character. now 72^20 is a lot. that's about 26 bits.

so it may be easier to remember, but it's not more secure.

but...

[edrugtrader]

but my dog DOES have fleas...

Improvement over WEP?!

[hobbesmaster]

Hold it, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that instead of collecting thousands of weak packets in RFMon you just need to collect one packet from each network and brute force it?

Which method is harder to crack? I'd take WEP. Simply because its takes longer to collect the necessary packets; especially on a smaller network. On a larger network it may work out to be better from a security standpoint for the cracker to start a brute force attack on the packet on a spare computer and let it sit for a few days instead of having him hide a pocket PC with a wifi card in range of the AP for a few days.

Re:Improvement over WEP?!

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

but doesn't this mean that instead of collecting thousands of weak packets in RFMon you just need to collect one packet from each network and brute force it?

If I understand correctly, WEP is vulnerable to this as well. You can capture one packet, decode it against a given passphrase, and then see if the IP header on the decoded packet has a correct checksum. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Lets just say that it takes a lot less time to find a set of weak ISV values.

YLFI

Re:Improvement over WEP?!

[hobbesmaster]

That depends. If its an underutilized network, it would be more time efficient to dictionary attack it than airsnort it.

Thats my experience anyways. If its a corporate wide network perhaps it could be owned far more easily by cracking WEP.

Re:Improvement over WEP?!

[LearnToSpell]

http://wepattack.sourceforge.net/

Takes about two minutes to check one network against their dictionary list, slightly longer for more, so you can really do both. Dictionary while you're waiting for airsnort, just in case.

Re:Improvement over WEP?!

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

If its an underutilized network, it would be more time efficient to dictionary attack it than airsnort it.

Heh, my experimental data might be hobbled by the fact that I wrote the cracker in Python while sitting utterly sleep deprived in a starbucks ;-)

LearnToSpells link looks interesting - will have to check it out!

YLFI

Re:Improvement over WEP?!

[mcroot]

It won't take long to collect the necessary packets though.

There are tools to reinject valid packets, that in turn cause more traffic, which gives you more packets to reinject which in turn....

An example is in bsd-airtools in the source file reinj.c, if I recall correctly.

WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[frostman]

I've just bought my first wireless kit (DLink 802.11b wireless router plus card for $60).

I did some reading on WEP and it sounds pretty frightening. Today I'm going over to set up the same kit for a friend who's NOT a slashdot type. I'm pretty-well used to data protection issues, and I take reasonable precautions and would also not freak out if something Bad happened. But I'm wondering what I should tell my non-techie friend.

Practically speaking, just how vulnerable is WEP? If my friend has a good non-dictionary password and uses "256 bit" encryption, is he reasonably safe from casual hijacking?

That's certainly what the manufacturers would have us believe, and the low prices and ubiquitous Starbucks access points seem to be causing a lot of folks to adopt wireless, at least out here in silicon valley.

Having read up on the security problems, I'm now hoping some of you can provide or point to real-world scenarios.

Hope this isn't too off-topic...

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[wfberg]

Practically speaking, just how vulnerable is WEP? If my friend has a good non-dictionary password and uses "256 bit" encryption, is he reasonably safe from casual hijacking?

He's save for about 6 million packets worth of traffic - a few hours. After that any kid with a laptop, a wireless card, and wepcrack 0wnz0rs his 455.

paper here

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[hobbesmaster]

It takes far longer than that. Getting thousands of interesting packets takes weeks for a 256bit WEP network being used by only one person.

And yes, this is from experience. I will neither confirm nor deny that I was given permission to try this...

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Dusty]

Ars Technica has a good summary of what you can do with SSID's and WEP to improve your wireless network's security:-

Security Practicum: Essential Home Wireless Security Practices

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Shakrai]

Practically speaking, just how vulnerable is WEP? If my friend has a good non-dictionary password and uses "256 bit" encryption, is he reasonably safe from casual hijacking?

Vulnerable enough that I won't use it at work without it being on the other side of our firewall and forcing the "Road-Warriors" to VPN into the network. I also have it setup (at work) so they can't access the Internet... only the VPN. Lot's of paranoia there, but why take chances?

At home I use my dinky little Linksys WAP11 (using a Cisco Aironet Card to connect to it). I run WEP and (more importantly imho) MAC address filters. The MAC for my Cisco card (and my friends D-Link card) is entered into the Linksys. In theory it will only allow those clients with that MAC to associate. So even (again in theory) if they break the WEP encryption, they won't be able to use my bandwidth. Of course they will be able to see and record all my packets... for this reason I still use ssh on my internal network.

To answer your original question, for home networks I think it's secure enough. Of course it helps my setup that I live out in the middle of nowhere and don't have to worry about the guy in the apartment next door :)

Note that the above theory is rendered moot if you leave the AP password set to "admin" and they can log into it and change it ;)

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[timeOday]

The threat is way overblown. I'm willing to bet that fewer than 1% of WEP-protected access points fall to cryptographic weakness (but my guesstimate will yield immediately to anybody with ACTUAL DATA that agrees or disagrees). Any sensitive data you send, you should be (and probably are) sending over ssl (when the little lock appears in your browser window), using ssh instead of telnet, etc. As for Starbucks access points, they're not protected by WEP anyways.

Just enable the WEP, use secure applications for sensitive data, and quit worrying about it.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[ch-chuck]

Don't worry, set him up, turn on wep, make some keys, and also use MAC filtering so only known stations can get in. To get around both those someone has to be fairly determined, just like someone determined to get in your house can probably do so, no matter what locks and alarms you install. That'll keep out the accidental neighbors and casual drive by scanners. Anything important like credit card numbers should be encrypted from browser to server with SSL anyway.

Now, if a bank or hospital was going to install a wireless wep on a campus with account passwords etc in the air in the parking lot, then you'd have good reason to worry.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Shakrai]

To answer your original question, for home networks I think it's secure enough. Of course it helps my setup that I live out in the middle of nowhere and don't have to worry about the guy in the apartment next door :)

I should also point out however, that when I worked for a WISP, we were out doing site surveys one time. I happened to point a 24db directional antenna towards my house and was able to associate (granted I had the WEP settings and knew what the SSID was) from about 1/2mi away going through a line of trees (and the walls of my house). And that's with the Linksys using the dinky stock antennas! Only my end (the Aironet card) had the big 24db rig on it. I had about 30-35% signal strength (more then ample in my experience). Surfed on it for a few minutes for the novelty :)

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Lukey Boy]

You know under Linux it's pretty trivial to change the MAC address of an Ethernet device, right?

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Shakrai]

You know under Linux it's pretty trivial to change the MAC address of an Ethernet device, right?

Yes, it's fairly trivial in Windoze too. It doesn't _hurt_ to enable the MAC address protection though. And if they are stupid enough to hijack your MAC while you are using it (and to figure out the MAC they'd first have to break the WEP), you'd know pretty quickly that something was going on.

Security in layers.... Unless you are going to buy a $550 Aironet 350 for your house (unlikely) you have to make do with what you have. The aforementioned setup is the best I can think of for the homeuser with a $80 Linksys AP.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[GSloop]

I have an AP in my house, and I don't allow any traffic at all unless it's running under IPSec VPN.

It's wide open, but firewalled off all by it's lonesome. No bother even doing WEP, IMHO.

'Course, I'm way paranoid.

I'm still waiting for a serious scientific review of WPA, though this actually makes me feel a bit better. It just means I'll share keys via disk or something that will hold a 256 byte mostly random key.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Lukey Boy]

The way I do it is no WEP, no MAC address protection; but, the only thing open on the wireless LAN is SSH to one box. Then a VTUN tunnel using the SSH connection from my laptop.

Lots of people can bounce onto the LAN and check it out, but there's nothing much there - nothing to ping, etc. Worked well so far (and I make sure to keep SSL/SSH up to date).

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[GSloop]

It's like trying to get accurate info about sucecssful hack attemts. Impossible.

WEP hacks is even worse. Those that use WEP probably couldn't tell if they were hacked if BO was loaded on their machine, much less packet monitor and notice there was a new station on the network.

WEP may not get hacked often, but frankly, I like deterministic approaches, rather than "no one will hack me, it's just too much work."

I want to know, if I do things right, it's nearly impossible to hack me unless you're the NSA or something.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

To get around both [wep & mac filtering] someone has to be fairly determined...

I've been thinking of it as putting "The Club" or a real auto alarm in a car-- knowing that these scurity measures won't protect against all the theives.

Am I too far off base with this analogy?

-cmh

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Shakrai]

The way I do it is no WEP, no MAC address protection; but, the only thing open on the wireless LAN is SSH to one box. Then a VTUN tunnel using the SSH connection from my laptop.

VTUN is a handy package. Used to use it at work before we went to FreeSwan.

I could implement such a setup at my house if I wanted to, but the original poster was asking about a setup for a non-techie friend, whom I doubt has a Linux box handy. Given that, I think the best solution is what I outlined.

I also forgot to include some other (fairly obvious) tidbits, like turning off SSID broadcasts, etc. I do think you can secure a Linksys or D-Link AP well enough for use at home, but that's just my humble opinion :)

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[LearnToSpell]

It doesn't _hurt_ to enable the MAC address protection though.

It's next to useless. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't help. If somebody's cracking your WEP key, MAC addressing isn't even going to slow them down.

And if they are stupid enough to hijack your MAC while you are using it (and to figure out the MAC they'd first have to break the WEP),

Not true. You can get the client MACs within seconds, without cracking anything.

you'd know pretty quickly that something was going on.

How?

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So even (again in theory) if they break the WEP encryption, they won't be able to use my bandwidth.

If someone has the knowledge and time to break WEP, how much more effort would be involved in finding and spoofing your MAC address? Wouldn't that just involve passively sniffing packets and then a simple ifconfig?

Not that I'm saying using MAC filters is a waste of time. I subscribe to the theory that each thing you do is going to stop X number of people who don't know how to overcome that thing.

My car has a car alarm, the club, gps tracking, a kill switch, and a foot pedal lock.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[ComputerSlicer23]

Does that mean you don't have external connections to the outside world? Depending on the meaning of "nearly impossible" is. Short of not having any external connections, it's merely a matter of time and effort on behalf of a dilgent, and highly skilled hacker if they decide they want to own you.

If you allow incoming connections for any reasonable number of services to communicate with the public: DNS, mail, Web. If you allow VPN access. If you make external connections that do nearly anything you can be had.

Probably not more then six months until somebody breaks in if they decide they want to break into your network.

If your really, really secure with your services, they'll just have to break into someplace you contact on a regular basis and tunnel the attack back to you when you connect to that third party. If there security is very, very, good, they'll just build a longer, and longer chain until they can finally find a flaw, and worm their back thru the series of trust relationships until they are on your network.

How far they can get once on your network depends on your level of paranoia, and how good your internal audits for security break ins are. The trick isn't keeping them out, you cannot do that. The trick is identifing they are in, and figuring out how to close the hole they exploited, and ensuring they are now off your network permanently.

Your best defense is probably that you aren't a financial institution, and you don't have enough money to blackmail more then likely. Note being worthy of the attention of a skilled hacker is the best defense, because then you are merely fending off script kiddies, and people who are joy riding on your computers. Script kiddies and other hackers break into easy things, and do them in volume because they enjoy it. Just because they don't break into you doesn't mean you are secure. It just means you aren't easy meat. Anyone who seriously wanted to own you can and will do so. It's just that the gratification to spending six months to prove you aren't secure isn't that interesting. There better be millions of dollars at the end of that much risky work.

Kirby

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Brad Mace]

I think 1-2 days is more likely, especially with only one person using it. The important thing is that it's no longer about casually driving by and noticing it's open. Someone would have to invest a lot of time to get past it. It's doubtful anyone is going to bother. Even more so when they could just drive down the block and find an open node. using MAC filtering also makes more work for intruders, though they can sniff those from your traffic and spoof them.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Shakrai]

How?

Umm. Do you think your going to keep surfing merrily away if there are two copies of your MAC address on the same LAN segment?

I never claimed it was bullet-proof. However, saying it doesn't help is just as extreme. For all you know, your network is being sniffed (and your WEP key cracked) by some Windoze script kiddie who hasn't the slightest clue what a MAC address us. Is there any compelling reason not to implement this protection on a home network, where you are likely only using one or two cards to begin with?

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm. Do you think your going to keep surfing merrily away if there are two copies of your MAC address on the same LAN segment?

Why couldn't you? Both computers will see the packets, and one will probably ignore them. It could screw you over if the other PC starts sending ICMP destination unreachable packets, but many people run "stealth firewalls" which could prevent this from happening.

If it is a problem, just DoS the other computer. A disassociate attack would be fast and easy, assuming you could do it without disconnecting yourself. Or you could simply wait for someone to turn off the other PC.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any sensitive data you send, you should be (and probably are) sending over ssl (when the little lock appears in your browser window), using ssh instead of telnet, etc.

Agreed. What really amuses me tho, is most AP's use SNMP to configure them, sending the password in cleartext every freaking step of the way. Way to go!

WEP's biggest problem is not that it can be cracked...it's that if you have a huge population of people using it (like, say, an ISP with 1000 users on over 200 AP's), then it's very God damn difficult to get everyone the keys, especially if you have to change them.

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tried this, and got logged off IRC and another messanger service (I'm too ashamed to say which one). IE did't work, but Opera did (obligitory MS dig). So yeah, if I'm using it I'd notice, and if I'm not, the amchine is off.

Although working out the mac of a broadcasting wifi card is indeed siple, but what about when there isn't one being broadcast?

Not that I'm to fussed, the airport is limited to 20% of the bandwidth available (bunch of gamers that we are), and _shouldn't_ be able to play with the firewall. If there is a way they could get througth the firewall from an "unsafe" port, then it could be done from the internet at large through the wired connection. And if thats not secure, then I shouldn't be worried about an insecure wireless node on an insecure network :D

Re:WEP newbie question - how bad is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although working out the mac of a broadcasting wifi card is indeed siple, but what about when there isn't one being broadcast?

If there isn't one being broadcast, then there's no packets being sent, and so it'd be pretty difficult to crack the WEP key.

Not New Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

This and many other security concerns were voiced years ago in the IEEE. Unfortunately, the buffoons who pushed the standard through were not interested in hearing about them.

Misdirected karma: they screw up, consumers get hit.

Re:Not New Hat

[floodo1]

wow your post is sooo useful when you post it as AC :(

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought i would put up a mirror as it looks like the site is really slowing down and might die soon.

Hey

[Bendebecker]

1..2..3. Hey that is the same combination I use on my luggage!

Re:Hey

[damiam]

That joke was kind of funny the first few times it was posted on /., roughly five years ago. Now, it's just lame.

Re:Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try 0 0 0. Nobody ever guesses that one.

Re:Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Or if you want evil security, 6 6 6 works well.

My Solution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically they are claiming that this protocol is insecure becase users choose bad passwords. Duh. Why not just let the user enter as pass phrase, then make an MD5 from the user supllied passphrase, then use the sum as the wireless passphrase. It's difficult to do a dictionary attack, and the user gets to stick with his chosen easy to remember pass phrase.

Re:My Solution..

[Drishmung]

So, instead of guessing the PSK and plugging it into the formula to see if it works (dictionary attack), you run the PTK through a one way hash (MD5), and...do the same thing.

If you know or can guess that the equipment has this extra step, you can do it too.

Did you mean instead to suggest that the equipment should take the pass-phrase, permute it in some random fashion (i.e., use it as the seed to a random number generator), and then use the resultant output as the PSK? Of course, if you do this, you have to enter the generated output as the PSK on the other stations (or else an attacker could just do a dictionary attack).

But, if you do that, you might as well just get the system to generate a random key in the first place---which is his point.

My Dog Has Fleas

[Anonymous Coward]

...my wireless router has a first name
it's l-i-n-k-s-y-s

my router has a SSID
it's l-i-n-k-s-y-s

RE: password security -- what about the old technique of using an acronym for something that wouldn't be hit by a dictionary attack? Um, like:

My Dog Has Fleas And Your Mom Does Too would create a password of "mdhfaymdt" ? Secure enough...and probably not in someone's best interest to share with anyone else.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas

[shird]

Actually, a dictionary attack is inlikely to break 'My Dog has Fleas' because it is composed of multiple words, is fairly long, and has mixed case. Dictionary attacks typically involve just one or possibly two words strung together. Anymore and it becomes pretty impratical.

The only pratical way to find that password is through brute force. In this scenario, the longer the password and more possible different characters (ie lowercase and uppercase, and spaces) makes it more difficult. Thus, 'My Dog has Fleas' would be more secure than 'mdhfaymdt' against a brute force attack. The latter could be broken in a matter of hours through brute force.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas

[ps_inkling]

Thus, 'My Dog has Fleas' would be more secure than 'mdhfaymdt' against a brute force attack. The latter could be broken in a matter of hours through brute force.

'my dog has fleas and you're my dog too?'

Re:My Dog Has Fleas

[Anonymous Coward]

read the parent post.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a dictionary attack is inlikely to break 'My Dog has Fleas' because it is composed of multiple words, is fairly long, and has mixed case.

Inlikely, added to the dictionary just today.

Re:My Dog Has Fleas

[shird]

I know how to spell unlikely. Did you notice how close the u and i keys are together on the keyboard?

This is *Supposed* to be hard

[TechyImmigrant]

The idea here (I know, I was there when we voted it into the standard) is that the PBKDF2 is computationally significant.

Thus when you perform your offline dictionary attack, for each lookup in the dictionary, you must perform 4096 HMAC_SHA1s and this might take some time if you are looking up a large number of dictionary entries.

The basic conflict is the wide disparity between the power of processors in low end 802.11 transceivers and high end computers. The time to compute the 4096 HMAC-SHA1s is significant on say a slow ARM7TDMI and the 4096 value is a compromise to limit the delay in computing this. This delay affects the time from pressing return on the keyboard, to the time the PTK can be known and communications can begin.

However the attacker can apply his cluster of 3GHz PCs, or his FPGA HMAC_SHA1 parallel processor, or his supercomputer array, and make the speed of dictionary lookups relatively insignificant compared against the strength of the passwords being used.

The wise people asked for a much higher number than 4096. Some implementation types beat it down to 4096, and here we are..

one for the crypto/math freaks

[nehril]

I think this problem is present in *any* system that relies on user passwords. according to the article, each character in a password is equivalent to about 2.5 "bits" of encryption (since you can't use the entire ascii bitspace and some words/letters are more common, etc). this is a higher number than I saw referenced in one of bruce schneier's books (he said 1.3 bits of entropy per char I think.).

so, if your 128 bit or 256 bit or bit security system is ultimately based from a human-rememberable (and thus probably short) password, is there ANYTHING that can be done short of requiring 30 character passwords?

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, only let the user try x number of passwords within y minutes.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[captain_craptacular]

I prefer to simplify things and only allow x number of attempts in x minutes. The y is just too confusing ;)

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[nehril]

a good point, but that doesn't help against the offline dictionary attack listed in this paper: sniff some data, crack the password offline, THEN connect/spoof/raise hell. it will appear succeed on the first *visible to you* attempt.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[mjc_w]

Then shouldn't your sig be

"Thex who would give up an essential libertx for temporarx securitx, deserve neither libertx or securitx"?

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[shokk]

This is where frequent password rotation comes into play. Security is more than that single great password. You need to have a continually changing flow of great passwords to keep one step ahead of hackers. What's in your password wallet?

We do that in corporations where we are forced to change the password every 3-6 months, but we gripe about it and avoid doing it elsewhere. How many of us really take that extra measure of security. Remember, security is a process, not a destination.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[cookd]

Kudos to a sibling post who brought up the fact that the only way to prevent this kind of attack is to limit the number of attempts possible in a span of time. The article/post failed to emphasize this enough.

When possible, it is nice to find an algorithm or a protocol that allows two parties to authenticate without actually revealing enough information to identify the key.

The lowest level of security would be where everything is out in the open for any observer -- they still have to observe, but one observation is all that is needed. For example, if you hand somebody your credit card, they have all of the information necessary to use it to steal from you -- it is all there on the card, perfectly legible. As another example, if you walk up to a terminal and type your password, anybody with camera pointed at the keyboard or some kind of electronic keylogger will be able to record your name and password on the wire, and then they know everything they need to know to take over your account.

Things are slightly more secure when some additional work is required after getting the information. The old-school UNIX passwd file with encrypted passwords out in the open was like this -- anybody could copy the passwd file, but they would then have to run a cracker on it for a few weeks or months before anything useful showed up. Now that computers are faster and security is more of an issue, the passwd file is shadowed so that the passwd file doesn't actually have the encrypted passwords, which is a good thing because the original crypt algorithm can now be cracked pretty easily. Thus exploit is similar -- you can watch a session initiation, and with only that info, you can crack the password.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[PD]

It's actually a stupid idea.

Your chance of winning the lottery is exactly the same if they change the winning numbers, or if they don't change them.

Making users change passwords does the following:

1) Annoys the users.
2) Users are likely to pick easy passwords to remember, rather than memorizing a really good password just once. Or worse, they will write the password down.
3) Does all that for no increase in security. Yay!

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[Khasmo]

This assumes that the hacker knows your rotation schedule and is always working with a current hash. The main point behind password rotation is to keep a step ahead. By the time someone can get a password, it has been changed, and passwords that have been compromised get replaced.

Changing passwords has the added benifit that it limits the time a hacker has to crack a particular hash, but you have a point, statistically speaking (though I have not actually done the math to prove it) if he were to get the new hash and start cracking that as soon as you changed passwords, his odds of finding in a given ammount of time are not significantly less.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[IMarvinTPA]

I think the basic idea is:
password_change_frequency = expected_time_to_crack - 1

That way, even if they now know your password, it is useless. (Assuming you don't just rotate something and the old password is then a very good clue.)

IMarv

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[4mn0t1337]

Your chance of winning the lottery is exactly the same if they change the winning numbers, or if they don't change them.

If that is the case, then why do you think they bother doing new number draws every week in a lottery? Why not draw the numbers once, and just keep that winning number for weeks until someone finally guesses it?

But your other points are valid.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[cookd]

I fell asleep before I could finish my post last night, and I hit "submit" as I was drifting away. So continuing where I left off...

There is a third category of transaction security, where even after observing the entire transaction, an eavesdropper doesn't have enough information to impersonate you. Generally, this takes the form of challenge-response. The server asks "42365?" and you answer "92581!" which is the correct answer. But an observer still doesn't know how to impersonate you, because next time, the server will ask "98765?" and the observer doesn't know that the answer is "45678!". Smart cards are like this, which is why they are more secure than credit cards or passwords.

Each of these three categories still have varying degrees of security.

In the first case, it is easy to use the information from a stolen credit card, but it would be pretty hard to make use of the information from a retinal scan. In both cases, you have all the information, but it's quite a pain to get your eyes replaced (if you get hungry, there's a sandwich and some milk in the fridge...).

In the second case, while reversing a crypt password isn't too tough anymore, it still takes a bit of work to reverse engineer a 1024-bit RSA key. In both cases, the information is out in the clear, but factoring a 1024-bit number is a lot more work than running the crypt algorithm a few billion times.

In the third case, "Mary had a what?" --> "Little lamb!" is easier than a smart card transaction.

While we would love to have a cryptographically strong variation on the third case for every possible authentication/encryption transaction, it just isn't practical. In the case of WEP/WAP/Whatever, there are a lot of limitations to work around. It has to work on cheap hardware, it has to be fast enough to handle the traffic, it has to work in the face of many dropped packets, it can't inconvenience the user too much, etc.

While I can think of a few things that I might have done differently, it seems like the new protocol is decent, given the limitations they were facing. While I wouldn't want to trust top-secret information to it, it seems that it is good enough for the average Joe.

Re:one for the crypto/math freaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone I know that is forced to change passwords frequently uses a numeric suffix like Houston-0, Houston-1, Houston-2, ... which would be only marginally (ie. not very) useful against a dictionary attack.

sec issue

[segment]

256bit PSK is used directly as the PMK. When the PSK is a passphrase, the PMK is derived from the passphrase as follows:

PMK = PBKDF2(passphrase, ssid, ssidLength, 4096, 256)

---------
Now I see where the problem is. Easily solvable...

alias passphrase = write "enter you MSG" \
read $MSG \
echo "$MSG" | rot13 | rot13 |mail -s Passphrase luzer@name.com

That wasn't so hard now was it?

wget -qO - kungfunix.net/fatality|sed -n '1!G;h;$p'

Shorter Version of the Article

[f1f2f3]

"Poorly choosen passwords lead to insecurity."

Well, duh. I didn't need three pages of dense, TLA-obscured claptrap to tell me that.

Re:Shorter Version of the Article

[TechyImmigrant]

No, its worse than that.

It is the fact that an OFFLINE dictionary attack is possible. If the protocol did not enable an offline attack, then you would be able to see the attacker attempting to guess the password with a live attack and then countermeasuers could be imposed.

Re:Shorter Version of the Article

[eggboard]

Anything out of context sounds stupid, dude. In this case, WPA has been advertised as a very secure method of wireless encryption at the link layer that replaces a flawed an cracked method.

WPA, in fact, relies on properly chosen passwords, which is a non-obvious problem given the hashing involved.

Re:Shorter Version of the Article

[Anonymous Coward]

If the protocol did not enable an offline attack, then you would be able to see the attacker attempting to guess the password with a live attack and then countermeasuers could be imposed.

Not a good idea. I got a car alarm that would warn me when my car was being stolen. One night I was at McDonalds and my keys start buzzing so I ran to the parking lot, got my ass kicked by the car jacker, then he took off in my car anyway.

most home users don't care.

[seibed]

really, I have to re-install windows about once every omnth or month and a half (maybe I could stretch it out a little bit longer, but with increasing issues and difficulties) I have long since abandoned my PC as a platform for any kind of critical information. If someone wants to use it, fine, go ahead. I prefer it if no one were malicious, but hey, i'd just be re-installing anyway. What about my bandwidth you say? have at that too. I'm not using it all anyway. I might be a little peeved when I am playing games, but its not going to kill me (well it might when I am in a game, but not in real life) These are the reasons I love knoppix... a nice clean start every time!

Re:most home users don't care.

[Mistah Blue]

You are being a little naive. What are you going to do if someone sends a threating email to the President from your wireless network? You are going to have a lot of Secret Service agents waking you up early in the morning with guns drawn.

You need to at least do a best effort to secure your home network.

News flash! Easily cracked passwords easy to crack

[rainwalker]

After reading the article (gasp!), this guy is saying that if you (the user) choose a passphrase that is susceptible to a dictionary attack, your passphrase could be compromised by someone using a dictionary attack. No kidding? I would have thought that choosing a passphrase of common words would make it HARDER for a brute-force program using a dictionary of common words to crack! Slow news day, or what?

He also points out that WPA is perfectly secure with a good shared key (such as generating 256 bits of random characters) or using the built-in 802.1X authentication system. So....what's the point here?

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Try not being a fat linux loving asshole.
She was bored, get over it.

What's that?

[dswensen]

perform an offline dictionary attack

What, you sneak up behind the sysadmin and brain him with a copy of Webster's?

Re:What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

perform an offline dictionary attack

What, you sneak up behind the sysadmin and brain him with a copy of Webster's?

Better that than using the Oxford English Dictionary. Talk about your weapons of mass instruction.

Common Passwords

[MikeDawg]

Dark Helmet: So the combination is 1,2,3,4,5 ... That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage.

President Skroob: . . . 1,2,3,4,5. That's amazing I've got the same combination on my luggage.

How to generate a good 8 byte PSK

[PureFiction]

hexdump -e "\"%04x%04x\n\"" -n 8 /dev/random

Pre shared key auth/keying is a bad idea. Public key based authentication with random session keys via integration with RADIUS or Kerberos is much more secure (and should be supported by any WPA capable AP)

Re:How to generate a good 8 byte PSK

[PureFiction]

Arg, I should proofread. The above will not print leading zeros. Try this instead:

hexdump -e "\"%4.4x%4.4x\n\"" -n 8 /dev/random

Re:How to generate a good 8 byte PSK

[AnotherBlackHat]

hexdump -e "\"%04x%04x\n\"" -n 8 /dev/random

I prefer;
head /dev/urandom | md5sum

Re:Major sky show and new North America speed reco

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh, looks like you should have posted AC

WPA dictionary attack

[uucpbrain]

Speaking as a cryptographer and longtime security geek, this weakness is about as damning as... using a 128 bit cipher that only gives 120 bits of protection. Look at the big picture. Most people don't even use WEP, let alone limit access by MAC address. The average user is SO oblivious to security, sharing passwords, opening .EXE attachments... I'd hate to recall how many times I found things like .rhosts files with '++' in them among career Unix programmers who must have known better. WEP was a semi-broken protocol, TACACS+ was a totally broken protocol, there was no way one could use them without compromising security. Just as nobody can use a number of commercial software products without compromising security.

WPA, on the other hand, is a very well-designed protocol. It is only as weak as its users are careless. And one need not choose "h^Ne#b8SV@,4g%yP" as a password to avoid this attack, any semi-uncommon phrase of 4 or 5 words will do.

I will deal with this problem by threatening users with a nasty note in their personnel file if they choose a sh*t passphrase -- and terminate their wireless access. And yes, I will try cracking the passwords myself, just as I have done with operating system passwords for several years.

I sure wish all my security problems were so simple! At least WPA *can* be secure, unlike the steaming heap of offal that most folks call a desktop operating system.

Re:WPA dictionary attack

[eggboard]

Sure, but do you see the problem here on the UI side? That's what my post and Robert's paper is about. The UI implementation of WPA for consumers encourages and allows poor password selection. It doesn't have to.

Re:WPA dictionary attack

[weileong]

One thing I'm curious about, is that nobody seems to be talking about the installed base of WEP-only wifi equipment already out there (which, as is evidenced by all the almost-as-excited-as-during-the-bubble-days VCs, is quite a large one). I've not heard of any plans by anyone to retrofit WPA onto existing WEP-only equipment (about the only one I know of is Apple's recent software update, but that's only for users of a subset of their installed base (those with the original Airport system aren't included), and the further subset of those who've purchased the latest release (10.3; no update for 10.2 has been released and it's unclear at this point if there ever will. Does anyone have any better info?)).

I'm sure the manufacturers would hope that people would just rush out and buy new WPA-capable equipment after junking their old WEP-only ones, but I'm figuring most people would just keep on using it (or is part of the WPA rollout going to involve a massive FUD campaign to instill The Fear Of Airsnort upon the general public?).

In which case, won't Airsnort et al retain "usefulness" well beyond the introduction of WPA and the ostensible "retirement" of WEP... ?

(Of course, none of this would apply to the people using completely unencrypted wifi. which is a yet bigger proportion of the wifi using population...).

Re:WPA dictionary attack

[Freeptop]

Any WEP capable hardware should be software upgradeable to comply with the TKIP portion of WPA. TKIP uses WEP encryption, but increases the size of the key and the size of the IV. The hardware for the encryption should (given the algorithm for RC4, which is the algorithm used in WEP) be able to handle any length key given to it. Frame generation is done in software in the MAC anyways. Thus, legacy hardware is at least capable of being retrofitted to comply with WPA TKIP (and 802.11i TKIP, which is slightly different) purely through a software upgrade.
If one wants to be able to work with the AES-CCMP portion of WPA or 802.11i, then new hardware will be necessary, but the whole point of the TKIP portions of the WPA and 802.11i standards was to allow legacy equipment to become compatible via software upgrades.

Now, why this is still better and why Airsnort won't be quite as effective:
Airsnort relied on the fact that everyone was using the same keys; all clients, for both unicast and multicast, used the same set of keys for encryption. That made it easy, using general network traffic trends, to crack the encryption. Another issue was that they used a small initialization vector to try to make it so that the same key wasn't used every time - the IV gets appended to the pre-specified key, and is stored in the frame that is sent over the air. While this extended the key by 24 bits, it became obvious that 24 bits was way too small, and allowed any individual combination of key and iv to be repeated fairly often, which makes it even easier for Airsnort to crach the keys.
First, WPA and 802.11i, whether using CCMP or TKIP, do not use the same key for all client encryption. Instead, a transient key is generated per client per session based on a Pairwise Master Key and some exchanged data. Additionally, the size of the key has been increased when using TKIP, and the size of the IV has been dramatically increased (the IV is now 128 bits when performing TKIP). These two measures combined make it much, much more difficult to crack the keys, since each client has a different key per client, and generally speaking, the IV is large enough that any individual key + IV combo is never repeated (before that happens a reauthentication will generally happen, and with reauthentication, a new transient key is generated). Finally, there are also additional countermeasures in the protocol that never existed under WEP, all of which are implementable in software.
WPA is not an attempt to force people to go out and buy new hardware - it is the specific realization that people do not want to do so, but new product will not be sold without a better security solution; thus, it was desired to create a protocol that older hardware can be upgraded to while also providing better security.
To get the best security requires upgrading (AES does require a hardware change), but getting better security that was available before does not require new hardware at all.

WPA itself remains robust and secure

[frovingslosh]

WPA itself remains robust and secure

Boy, some peole just want to find things to complain about. I just read another "you have to protect us from ourselves" article today, perhaps this should have been included in their list. Personally, I think if people want to hurt themsleves this way they should be allowed to do so. If they do it as part of their job then better qualified technical people should take their place.

It has been,

[infonick]

and always will be that computer security is a deturrent for script-kiddies. if someone wants your computer to be a smoldering pile of has-been, it will happen no matter how much money you "invest".

FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU

(IT)

Re:Major sky show and new North America speed reco

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to have seen this story. This happened live, right now, and I have friends that could have seen it. Liked the earlier /. on the sky meteor, and would have been way better if /. could have posted in advance to go look at it!!! The guy posted as a story and a OT thread, but that gets dumped to the dregs here, so we still don't hear about it.

/. has good filter people. Must be a better way to handle OT major announces. That Guy Fawks story today is fun, but I could have heard it tomorrow with no difference, and still have friends get to see the record breaking today.

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[floodo1]

umm yeah stfu, saying things like "ima not do anything about it cept complain" is useless

From the Minutes of the IEEE 802.11i meeting

[TechyImmigrant]

Presentation - Tim Moore, Doug Whiting, Jesse Walker - doc 02/545r0 - Mapping Password to PSK
Standardize a method to generate a 256 bit PSK from an ASCII password.
PSK = PBKDF2(password, ssid, ssidlen, 4096, 256)

Jesse: Only do this if you have to. Security is bad.
Tim: Use hard to guess passwords. Also change SSID from default.
Jesse: I would suggest that every AP ship with a different SSID.
Comment: This forces the administrator to set them to a common value in order to roam.

Comment: Why so big (4096)
Doug: Increases the number of effective bits by that amount.
Comment: How long does this take?
Tim: 17ms on my machine.
Comment: There is a Unicode problem here with UTF8. Results will be different based on code page used.
Comment: Will a 1 byte SSID cause a problem with this?
Tim: This will work, but won't be very good.
Doug: Doc says don't use this in the corporate environment. Suggested for home use.

Comment: Apple had a concept of pass phrase. Is this the same?
Chair: I don't believe they ran it through a function.
Tim: How much time to people want to review the draft?
Chair: If we postpone a motion, will anybody look at it?
Jesse: Do you want it incorporated as normative?
Comment: It could be normative for optional.
Tim: Either we make it normative or WECA does.
Jesse: We could put it in an informative annex.

Motion by Russ Housley
Motion to incorporate document 02/545r0 as an informative annex.
Second: Jesse Walker

Discussion:
Comment: Request to change document to use passphrase instead of password.

Motion to amend by Donald Eastlake.
Change motion to be:
Motion to incorporate document 02/545r0 as an informative annex with password replaced by passphrase.
Second: Paul Lambert.

Discussion:
Comment: We have not properly defined "passphrase". Does the editor know this definition?
Jesse: I have seen it before.
Comment: Call the question
Chair: Any objection?
None

Vote on motion to amend: 22-1-2 Passes

New main motion:
Motion to incorporate document 02/545r0 as an informative annex with password replaced by passphrase.

Any discussion on new main motion?
None

Vote on new main motion: 24-0-1 Passes

Cryptography is not for the math-impared

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you getting this stuff?!?

assuming there are about 10K words in common vocabulary, and you use 10 words, that's about 10,000^10. pretty large, but only about 23 bits.

10,000^10 ~ (2^13.3)^10 = 2^133 = 133 bits of encryption.

but your 20 character password has a huge entropy. you have 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 numbers and about 10 punctuation marks. that's 66 possibilities per character. now 72^20 is a lot. that's about 26 bits.

66 possibilities * 20 chars ~ (2^6)^20 = 2^120 = 120 bits of encryption.

Re:Cryptography is not for the math-impared

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's talking about brute force attacks. If you are only allowed to have a 1 character password and the only possible password for that 1 character is lowercase a-z, then you have 26 possible password combinations. But if you have 2 characters, now you have 676 possible password combinations.

So regardless of how random a password is, in a brute force attack, a longer password will always take longer to crack.

Re:Cryptography is not for the math-impared

[adrianbaugh]

A program implementing a true brute force attack would be really stupid, though, at least for [J. Random Muppet]'s account; lots of time would be wasted trying aaaa, aaab, aaac etc., when the password is far more likely to be "password" or "150367". Once you force people to use passcodes of a length sufficient that even dumb people are likely to enter more than one word, or a word with at least one number, you enforce a level of security unbreakable by most entities over the average duration of a user's session. OK, that isn't anywhere near perfect but it's a lot better than allowing "password", "banana" or "slashdot"....

Tubgirl warning

[Anonymous Coward]

Above is tubgirl link. why do they want us to see it?

WPA and Airport.

[Daleks]

When I try to enable WPA (Enterprise) with the latest Airport software it tells me, (a) it is not compatible with my 802.11b card, (b) it is not compatible with MAC address access lists, and, (c) it is not compatible with WDS. WDS is where you can chain Airport connectivity over the air, which I use, and (b) only occurs under WPA Enterprise as opposed to personal. I can see (a) being rationalized under needing better hardware for better encryption, and I was going to upgrade regardless, but (b) and (c)? Doh!

Looking for password choice guide...

[bluegreenone]

Maybe a year ago I read this great guide on choosing a password that went through all the mathematics of how long it would take to break a password with just regular words, one with mixed case letters, one with irregularly placed characters, etc. It gave some good practical advice for coming up with memorable passwords that were secure. Can anyone direct me to this document? I've tried googling but I haven't had any luck. Don't remember much more about it. Thanks!

Re:Looking for password choice guide...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry I don't know the document but I would recommend playing with John for a few months (you don't have to sit in front of the screen for all that time). Its interesting that some of the notionally easy to crack words don't get cracked. All the sys-admins that I've seen enforce password choices are actually ahead of John's default ruleset.

True.. But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but how would polite people know whether a site is open intentionally or not?

That's one of the many reasons why I proposed the setting up of a reserved TLD (e.g. .here) to help with this sort of thing.

That way Joe Schmoe can just do http://here/ or something like that and learn more about the WiFi service/area he is using, terms and conditions. And there's lots more you can do with this sort of thing.

http://www.warchalking.org/comments/2002/9/27/12 49 29/286/2

http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-yeoh-tl dh ere-01.txt

Organizations Do This to Themselves

[Valar]

Many institutions unwittingly standardize on weak passwords. For example, a certain EE department at a certain university (that I might attend), has a password convention of six characters, letters and numbers, but no two letters or numbers are allowed next to each other. So all the passwords are number, letter, number, letter, etc or letter, number, letter, number. They don't even require mixed case letters.

Re:Organizations Do This to Themselves

[/dev/trash]

Christ, who the hell are these people? I wonder if their parents had any children who lived.

Re:Organizations Do This to Themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, sure, obviously.

Adding more constraints always makes the password stronger because, um, it looks weirder, or um, the radix is sort of bigger somehow because um, constraining the range of possibilities actually increases effective randomness because, um, oh look it's been a long day can you just make another appointment with my secretary?

Re:Organizations Do This to Themselves

[raehl]

While nlnlnl | lnlnln is not as good as llllll, it *IS* better than letting users do "password".

Easier than a dictionary attack is getting a user list, picking a common word, and then trying that password on each user.

Re:Organizations Do This to Themselves

[Valar]

Then you disallow dictionary words and some "clever" variations thereof (my suggestion to them), but you don't specify a password format (especially one as weak as 52^3*10^3 [even that is optimistic, because I'm sure most people only use lowercase, just like normal, thus reducing the strength to 26^3*10^3, hashes of which would be findable with a proper audit tool in a couple of seconds]).

Trying to break encryption?

[danielsfca2]

> yes, I will try cracking the passwords myself,

Are you sure that's not a DMCA violation?

Re:Trying to break encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if he takes notes... :)

The people in my workplace are pretty bad about leaving equipment (PDA's and laptops) in visable and under-attented areas. Finally got money to give everyone a security cable and a strong lecture on it's use after we got an IT staffer (but not form our site) to see how many laptops and PDA's he could collect in a day. 26 PDA's, 14 laptops in two hours.

At least the secure proects have encypted hard drives (you can reformat them, but then it's loss ofequipment only)

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to be the one to break this to you: She is a slut. If your story is true, then be glad she has made it easy for you to be rid of her. If you "patch things up" and act like things are all right or that nothing happened, then dude, welcome to her little finger. Watch Me, Myself and Irene if you want to see your future. You can't build a future with someone that has no morals or conscience.

On the other hand, if you just wanna get your rocks off, then go on into your roommates bedroom and join in and bang her while she is blowing him. Just remember, and this is very important: Do Not Kiss Her!

Oh, you may want to double wrap that rascle too.

Re:Major sky show and new North America speed reco

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks & good thinking. Reason I posted under my own id is this is a great story, at least according to other more specialist forums. How many times on Slashdot do you get to hear about something as a main article BEFORE another site posts it? How many times do you get to see a world speed record broken over your own town? When I sent the original article I could find no mention of it. Did a lot of trawling, and now found some news on various special interest aviation boards.

Given there was a lot of interest in the Concorde mistaken for meteor article, I figured it would be excellent for some slashdotters to get the chance to see it with their own eyes. Not just some digital camera photo a week old. Luckily some people got to see it, and a happy co-incidence if a few of them were slashdotters.

Now if that kind of scoop gets rejected, and OT stories are automatically relegated to the dumpster, I know nothing important and happening now i find out about will ever get posted. Will be content to read and enjoy slashdot as an AC.

open waps...

[Eyston]

...promote terrorism!

Seriously though, is there any reprecussion if some stranger comes up, enters your WAP, and downloads kiddie porn or *gasp* illegal mp3's?

-Eyston

Re:open waps...

[Archfeld]

as long as it is downloaded to their machine and not mine it is not my problem....honestly, and I am NOT ADVOCATING KIDDIE PORN, but is viewing it illegal or just producing it, selling or commercially distributing ?

Re:open waps...

[cookd]

They can nail you for posession. Kinda like drugs.

Re:open waps...

[stripes]

They can nail you for posession.

Wait a minute. Person A has an open WAP. Person B downloads kiddie porn using person A's WAP. Assuming person A doesn't have a caching web proxy how does person A posess anything that person B downloaded? It isn't on his WAP (granted it was in his WAP's RAM for a few milliseconds), it isn't on his laptops, it isn't on his desktops, it isn't printed out in his house, it isn't hiding in his car.

Wouldn't that be like charging person A for kidnapping if person B drove across his lawn with a trussed up body in their trunk?

It doesn't pass the sniff test.

Now this being "anything to protect the children" America I can see them charging Person A with something else, some sort of aiding charge or something. (actually I guess they could charge you with anything, but getting a judge to not laugh at possesion when nothing is possesed seems like a long shot)

Re:open waps...

[jolyonr]

Yep, you'll be able to quite easily prove that the pr0n was never on your computer - the problem is that you'll have to wait until *after* the authorities have broken down your door at 6am and taken away all your computers for analysis.... And persuading your ISP to let you re-register as a customer once they've cut off your account.

Jolyon

Re:open waps...

[stripes]

Yep, you'll be able to quite easily prove that the pr0n was never on your computer

Probbably not, only "is not currently on, not even in the unused space where you can see bits of deleted files". (which ought to be good enough)

the problem is that you'll have to wait until *after* the authorities have broken down your door at 6am and taken away all your computers for analysis

Yeah, ok, I can see that. It took Steve Jackson Games what a year to get their stuff back? That wasn't kiddie porn either, it was "hacking" (or writing a game that had a hackign aspect that was so totally unlike real hacking it couldn't hav e even helped anyone who wanted to learn).

Hey, wat'sa matter? You no understand English?

[Eevee]

You can't come in here unless you say "swordfish". Now, I give you one more guess.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Dear lying Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! What a fucking loser you are. You post the same thing as me but then point to my article which was posted 10 minutes earlier and say its a troll just to try and get mod points.

I also loved how you posted as an AC to try to back up your claim.

Fucking moron.

ARTICLE IS NOT A TROLL IT WAS POSTED FIRST

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen to the idiot below who as AnnieCoulter copied and pasted this text 10 minutes after I did in an attempt to get mods points.

Yeah like anyone wouldn't figure out that AnnieCoulter who copied and pasted the above post and then posted as an AC saying this was troll wasn't the same person.

This is just a troll trying to get karma so that they can troll at +1. Dumb ass.

802.11[abg] security basics

[apachetoolbox]

WiFi security basics:http://azwardriving.com/security/

This post was copied from the original one below

[Anonymous Coward]

for mod points. Lame.

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, join the club.

I've never hooked up with anyone and I've been depressed for like 6 years. I'm 21 and I've been on a single date and that relationship fizzled within days of that date. I'm socially incompetent, and messing up in my engineering classes.

You're doing better than I am. And hey, at least you get to see her topless!

Kerberos

[GreenKiwi]

Why don't these companies start implementing Kerberos? Or something similar. My understanding is that no passwords are ever sent out over the network.

http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/

Re:Kerberos

[Bored Huge Krill]

the problem isn't that passwords are sent over the network in the clear. They aren't. The problem is that any security system* that relies upon passwords as the basic secret is vulnerable to an offline dictionary attack; collect a sample of an exchange where the password was used somehow to encrypt a nonce also sent over the network, and try all the words in the dictionary that might be used as a password in an attempt to replicate the same exchange. When you get a match, bingo - you have the password.

* there are some known systems that use passwords but which are not susceptible to this attack, invoving a carefully bound combination of passwords and a Diffie-Hellman exchange. I don't have a reference to hand, but such a system exists. Kerberos isn't it, though.

Krill

Don't understand

[pclminion]

I still don't understand why we need to have crypto standardized in the wireless protocol itself. If you are actually concerned about security, why not:

1. Use IPSec, or
2. Restrict the access point so that no connections can be made anywhere except to a VPN server

I'm currently planning something along the lines of (2) at home. I plan to use the hostap driver for Linux and firewall the wireless interface off from everything except for a single port which goes through to a VPN server. In order to talk to ANYBODY the client will have to log in through the VPN.

This way if/when a weakness is discovered in the crypto I just upgrade the software on the server/client instead of blowing money on new hardware every time they standardize on something else.

The only problem is that users can still DOS each other wirelessly, but there's nothing that can be done about that.

Re:Don't understand

[C10H14N2]

That is exactly what I did to relative success...until I created another VPN connection to my office, which happily returned a public address on a network seemingly devoid of any firewall protection whatsoever. "Hello, you've got DoS!" Can't name names, but their acronym rearraged sounds like "I SUCK."

Re:Don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

And how exactly does this VPN scheme work in an environment where a user has one computer connected through a wireless base station and nothing else?

Not everyone has the knowledge or resources to be setting up VPN gateways in order to secure their wireless access. There is a definite need for something more in the consumer sector to deal with wireless security issues.

Just because -you- don't need it doesn't mean that -nobody- needs it.

Re:Don't understand

[C10H14N2]

Clearly, the problems with BKAS security protocols likely will not be solved any time soon.

The perception that a WAP that is connected to absolutely nothing but the direct internet connection creates any greater risk takes an awe-inspiring level of logical prowess. If the WIRED connection has no security, and why would it if you have nothing connected to it, why bother with the WAP? That's like putting a padlock on a screen door.

Re:Don't understand

[pclminion]

And how exactly does this VPN scheme work in an environment where a user has one computer connected through a wireless base station and nothing else?

Simple, the WAP has the VPN server built into its firmware and uses NAT to make the VPN address appear to be the same as the hard line address. It's not that hard to have the user install the VPN client, since they already need to install the wireless driver in the first place.

All I was doing was describing an example of how I would implement a system using a VPN. That doesn't mean all VPN-based solutions necessarily have to be overly technical. It can all be hidden inside the wireless driver and access point. Point being, the cryptography is no longer fixed in the wireless protocol.

how about my password?

[SHEENmaster]

6cea e4ca 6713 721c 4cbf 71a4 e1aa 8972 0a03 f9d0 47a9 8f3c 9ead 8fb4 35d9 38c0 0406 1f02 0c46 878f 42f8 5ec1 77c5 1a99 f64b 5ad3 bb82 2c93 7870 a725 ba29 dd2b c470 0e70 3bf4 9c50 01a3 31cd c717 0b68 afe0 d479 62b2 46c0 a0c6 af61 c8e0 1915 01f4 8df8 be64 7401 4ed7 1459 766c d888 e772 f41b b310 e958 ebf6 87a1 c0e7 7a60 99d1 38ff d009 4c65 7a5f dbb0 f347 7a65 1f34 254c 8167 d103 4e34 9fc7 c97b 9ac0 0575 12a5 4f0d 9c87 5015 a647 ab9d 0ff6 f940 c1e7 1699 bfef 9827 b19f 9bc9 8391 3985 ed5e 275d f2c0 d3cd d489 13d3 6d0c 9aba 85e2 221d 1990 2fc8 1584 f2cf f7a1 98de 819d 6d2f 954e 83f0 d4a6 b854 940b 6cec a490 f7ce f556 fff2 fc53 daee 7af2

By coincidence, I do plan to name my kids in hex. Leet-speak would make them look like wimps, while 6cea would certainly make my kid the coolest throughout school.

Re:how about my password?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not at least name them DEADBEEF and B00BBABE?

Re:how about my password?

[Merk]

Maybe our kids can play together, have you met my daughter 0xCAFEBABE and my son 0xBEEFD00D?

Re:how about my password?

[Dr. Photo]

Your "password", in ASCII, with nonprinting characters escaped to \ddd decimal:

l\234 \228\202 g\19 r\28 L\191 q\164 \225\170 \137r \10\3 \249\208 G\169 \143< \158\173 \143\180 5\217 8\192 \4\6 \31\2 \12F \135\143 B\248 ^\193 w\197 \26\153 \246K Z\211 \187\130 ,\147 xp \167% \186) \221+ \196p \14p ;\244 \156P \1\163 1\205 \199\23 \11h \175\224 \212y b\178 F\192 \160\198 \175a \200\224 \25\21 \1\244 \141\248 \190d t\1 N\215 \20Y vl \216\136 \231r \244\27 \179\16 \233X \235\246 \135\161 \192\231 z` \153\209 8\255 \208\9 Le z_ \219\176 \243G ze \314 %L \129g \209\3 N4 \159\199 \201{ \154\192 \5u \18\165 O\13 \156\135 P\21 \166G \171\157 \15\246 \249@ \193\231 \22\153 \191\239 \152' \177\159 \155\201 \131\145 9\133 \237^ '] \242\192 \211\205 \212\137 =3 m\12 \154\186 \133\226 "\29 \25\144 /\200 \21\132 \242\207 \247\161 \152\222 \129\157 m/ \149N \131\240 \212\166 \184T \148\11 l\236 \164\144 \247\206 \245V \255\242 \252S \218\238 z\242

You bastard. That doesn't spell anything!

Re:News flash! Easily cracked passwords easy to cr

[eggboard]

You're missing the point here: you're sophisticated and understand that poor password choice produces high risk.

Since WPA is susceptible to dictionary attacks, wouldn't you build an interface that would reject poor passwords? Or would you advertise WPA as a way to enter simple passwords? You're smart: you'd build an interface that had crack behind it and a good dictionary, or at least required 20 digits and some punctuation.

Since the marketing folks and interface designers are encouraging the use of simple passwords, this dramatically increases the risk to consumers that their networks aren't truly secure.

Is she hot?

[Anonymous Coward]

If she is, how can I get ahold of her? I want a peice of that!

How is this worse?

[Halo-]

Okay, so users might pick a password which is less than 20 characters and is dictionary based. Guess what? They always will... Security is a balancing act. If you make security too cumbersome, then users will find a shortcut and abuse it, making it worse than no security. If the spec enforced something like: "passphrases must be at least 128 hex characters" you'd end up with a bunch of passwords which were all "AAAAA..." (or something similiar)

The simple truth is people are lazy. How many passwords do you have? And how many password guarded accounts? I bet even the most diligent of us out there only have a small number of "good" passwords which we use for damn near everything and never rotate.

The problem with WEP was flawed crypto. No matter how good my password was, someone could crack it with unacceptable ease. At least with this new scheme those of us with "good" passwords have a chance.

Folloup problem

[j.leidner]

Plus, hackers can obtain passwords from the wireless net that they can try against other systems if the user has not been educated to use different passwords for different systems, which is less of an issue with traditional nets.

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Your story might be a little more plausible if your post didn't mention that it was 3 am when the time of your post makes it 8:14. So that puts you where, Turkey? Greece? Tel Aviv? So either you're an American loser in the near east, or you're a pathetic excuse for a liar.

Better luck next time.

Tell me about it. I practically orgasmed...

[Ayanami Rei]

when I read buried way down in the Solaris 9 12/02 release notes that they'd be FINALLY supporting md5 password crypts.

And in typical Sun style, they created a new plugin architecture to support it. There are all of two useful plugins (the standard crypt is built into libc)... ::eye roll::

Re:MY BEST FREND IS A WHORE

[Anonymous Coward]

Would also help if he hadn't been posting it for weeks. I see he's had to go AC now so obviously it's still in his posting history.

WEP isn't that bad to begin with

[Brad Mace]

If you're smart when you set up your access point, and turn on WEP, 99.9% of people that might hack your network are going to go find an easier target. The typical figure I've heard is 24 hours or more to get enough traffic to break the encryption. Unless someone knows you have something they want, they're not going to bother.

Home users are going to generate less traffic than businesses, and so it will take even longer to get enough traffic. Unless you happen to notice a van parked outside your house for a couple days, or find yourself staring down the barrel of a pringles can, you can relax.

1. Turn off SSID broadcasting
2. use a unique SSID
3. For God's sake, change the admin password
4. Turn on WEP
5. Use MAC address filtering

Congratulations, you're now more trouble than you're worth.

Re:WEP isn't that bad to begin with

[4mn0t1337]

Given all of that, I can be into a system in about 5 seconds.

That is presuming best case (profile hardware, use hardware targeted exploit (not all WEP implementation is same), collect 4 data packets, user only using 40 bit encryption, bam! you are in).

Yeah, I understand with 104bit (or in rare exception 128bit+IV) will take a while longer, depending on traffic. (Certainly not 24 hours, but also register that all it takes is a neighbor that has to do nothing but set up a machine and forget about it until it has collected enough. In some of these higher density apartment blocks, that means several HUNDRED threats.)

But, a lot of this discussion is on home users, not your average computer geek, and I suspect that most users if they do any of the above list, will do 2, 3 and 4, but, path of least resistance being what it is, will only do 40bit.

Even if they also do 1 and 5, then that only adds a few more seconds here.

The point is that the above list, although an impediment, is usually only a few seconds of deterrent. Which really amounts to none whatsoever.

Far from "more trouble than you're worth."

liar warning

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it, its legit!

thanks!

[morcheeba]

good advice. I just wish it was automatic & that more people knew they were vulnerable. I live on a quiet street and run kismac every so often, so I'm hoping my isolation will protect me... but I haven't tried a high-gain antenna yet!

Radius that connection and you will be fine

[Mdeliberto]

I got wi-fi. I got 802.11g, I waiting for i. I live in the a densely packed suburb, with several friends who go to my school who love to war-drve. Tehy have contests. It is actually quite funny. I am helping them map out active connections. They know I have wi-fi. They try like hell to get into my net, but I have an openBSD box running a radius server. I don't have all that much to worry about. They have been trying since august and still haven't gotten in. These aren't script kiddies, these are the kids who got 5's on the AP comp test. Did I mention that we all studied independently for it, no teacher.

Re:Radius that connection and you will be fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh. Look at you.

Re:Radius that connection and you will be fine

[Anonymous Coward]

What'd you get on your English test?

*sigh* Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

...and an unoriginal one too. This is the third time I've seen it, and I haven't even been looking.

Passphrase sucks...

[craenor]

Carry on, nothing to see here.

Not a big deal

[mcrbids]

Guys, wifi is limited in scope to that which is not more than a few hundred yards from the access point. The password doesn't have to stop everybody, just everybody not too far away.

That limits the damage scope of a malicious party to that within a half a mile of their present location.

The *same* limitations of passwords on the public Internet, however, are much more likely to be damaging. Let me give an example...

How many people use email with pop3 over the Internet? Not only are these accounts typically set up with crummy passwords (like "Robert" - their middle name, or "120871" - their b/day) but then the passwords are sent, several times/day in plaintext!

And yet, with all of these big, huge, security no-nos, pop3 reigns supreme as the standard for email receipt on the 'net, and seldom is there actually a problem.

So, to whit, we have an issue like "A credit card can be used to bypass the locks on many doorknobs" and it makes front page at /.?

Re:Not a big deal

[stripes]

Guys, wifi is limited in scope to that which is not more than a few hundred yards from the access point.

Type "bi-quad antenna primestar" into google. Only one end needs that to go a signifigant distance. Way way way more then a few hundred yards.

The *same* limitations of passwords on the public Internet, however, are much more likely to be damaging.

Fewer people are in a position to see that traffic (not no people mind you, just fewer). Or at least fewer people that won't lose their job if they are cought. I'm more worried that someone a half mile away who has nothing better to do on their weekend is gonna try to spy on people for the hell of it then someone 57 miles away who works for the Telco and if they choose to peek in on peoples porn^H^H^H^Hweb surfing risks their job.

Re:Not a big deal

[mcrbids]

I'm more worried that someone a half mile away who has nothing better to do on their weekend is gonna try to spy on people for the hell of it then someone 57 miles away who works for the Telco and if they choose to peek in on peoples porn^H^H^H^Hweb surfing risks their job.

Then you have an inaccurate assessment of risk. Try this. Get a list of every email address you've gotten an email from in the past 2 years. If you have a Linux box, this is a simple regex to your ~/Mail folder.

Now, write a quick script that attempts to connect to each of the ISPs responsible for each of these addresses, and tries to login with any of 20 or so passwords... STARTING WITH THE SAME PASSWORD AS THE LOGIN NAME.

I'd bet that the odds are greater than 50/50 if you have *any* decent number of email addresses, that you'll get a match.

Add to this simple, freely downloaded mining scripts that mine websites and/or usenet for email addies, and you have a virtual guarantee of free Internet service for life in an afternoon's work.

I'm not advocating that you shouldn't be secure - I'm merely stating the obvious. Basic precautions - reasonable passwords, enabling the encryption on wifi, etc. when done as intended will provide a surprisingly adequate degree of security.

When faced with these simple, preventative steps, most of your problems move on to greener pastures.

Get out of my head!!!

[Merk]

Argh!!! Get out of my head!!! How'd you do that? How'd you guess my uber-secure password! Well since you somehow got the password, I might as well give you the full passphrase: "Human resources Said 2 specify What might Not work / O Lovely grits get Dem with Miss natalie". Now GET OUT OF MY HEAD you mind-reading bastard!

Re:Get out of my head!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or "Here's to swimmin with bow legged wimmin", but whatever floats your boat.

I'm Safe!

[Steve B]

because Linksys, Apple, and others are letting users enter My Dog Has Fleas as their passphrase, WPA might be less secure for home users than WEP

Ha! It's my cat that has fleas, so that password doesn't apply to me.

Re:first greased yoda doll post shizznogg!

[Anonymous Coward]

On to step 2!

Enjoy your W32/worms

[Radical Rad]

If that's such a safe thing to do then how about posting the address of the building so the local l337 punkz can drive by and make sure you've installed your Blaster/Nachi patches.

Re:first greased yoda doll post shizznogg!

[bensagenius]

I'm sorry. I'll take the -1. I LIKE IT TOO!!!!!

or does it?

[SHEENmaster]

hd /dev/random #It's my little way of saying the kids probably aren't really mine, and their genetic code could've come from anywhere.

Re:or does it?

[Dr. Photo]

If you're head(1)ing from /dev/random, does that imply that your kids come from the "shallow end of the entropy pool"? ;-)

I don't have a dog

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you don't have a dog, or he/she doesn't have fleas. Would it be more secure to use "I don't have a dog" or maybe "MY dog doesn't have fleas" or "If I had a dog, he/she wouldn't have fleas". Or any combination thereof.