Stronger Encryption for Wi-Fi

sp00 writes "The first products certified to support Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, the latest wireless security technology, were announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance on Wednesday. The Wi-Fi Alliance says WPA2 is a big improvement on earlier wireless security standards, such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), which hackers have found easy to circumvent. It includes Advanced Encryption Standard, which supports 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit keys."

Comments

"Easy to circumvent"?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the known WEP attacks are based on receiving weak IV frames (usually after sifting through gigabytes of data). Modern WiFi chipsets (i.e., those made within the last 2 years or so) do not send weak IV frames all that often, if at all.

It is not as easy as everyone says. Try it with some brand-new, high quality equipment and you may be surprised at the result.

Pointless..

[mcknation]

As long as these acess points are shipped with encryption turned *OFF* by default this is like pissing in the wind. It could be 1 billion bit one time pads and woulnd't make any difference. In my neighboorhood there are 10 unencrypted networks....all on the default channels. Out of the box straight onto the network is how they are set up. Joe Sixpack doesn't have time to deal with encryption.

*don't worry much residential war drivers..there will still be free lunch for a long time to come... /-McK

Re:WPA2?

[lizrd]

Not exactly. Wi-Fi/WPA/WPA-2 are all industry standards based on the various 802.11? IEEE standards. The difference is that WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatability Alliance) actually does testing rather than just publishing standards like IEEE does. In order to get the fancy sticker on the package you need to pay a couple of grand and get your product tested to the standards. The benefit of certification is that you have some idea that the product was actaully implemented to the standard correctly.

That said, WPA-2 provides basically zero benefit over WPA. WPA relies on the same RC-4 algorithm as WEP, but has a few patches put in place to resolve the problems it had. The most important one is using a new key for each frame. Given a choice between an algorithm that can be broken given 11MB of data and one that has no known attacks, do you think that it matters which you use to encrypt 1500 bytes? Not really.

The good news about WPA-2/802.11i (same thing, just certified and a less scary name for the PHBs) is that it breaks hardware compatibility, and that means there's a chance that things have been done right this time.

Actually...

[TPS Report]

...keep my access point wide open for anyone to use. If you want to look at my GF's reciepe's or our photos, go right ahead.

Yesss.. that sounds like a great idea.

However, if you don't mind, I think I'll skip all the "take a look at my recipies" formalities and go straight to

- sniffing your email passwords,
- reading your email,
- sending email under your account from your IP,
- using your wireless access point to spam,
- surf some underage porn using your IP,
- seed my "next big worm" from your connection,
- browse/sample your internal network from the IP your WAP so conveniently gave me,
- and finish up by making various explicit threats against the president on the newsgroups while simultaneously using your cable connection to make VoIP calls to the NSA and reading them some of your previously mentioned fine recipes.

I almost forgot to say thank you for the free access point. Where are my manners...
;)