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Elcomsoft Claims WPA/WPA2 Cracking Breakthrough
secmartin writes "Russian security firm Elcomsoft has released software that uses Nvidia GPUs to speed up the cracking of WPA and WPA2 keys by a factor of 100. Since the software allows them to network thousands of PCs, this anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks; any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether."
This doesn't surprise me. Anyone who wasn't already assuming that anything you sent via wireless was already in the hands of your enemies (unencrypted) is a bit naive.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
With good keys, even a 100x increase in cracking speed is still not fast
Don't use a little 8-character passphrase. Use long keys, and don't just leave them in place forever. Change them periodically.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Most businesses I've seen have had easily guessable passwords, used open relays, or WEP encryption. Many don't change their keys even after firing someone. Saying that this is a "death knell" is serious hyperbole since, for many companies, convenience trumps hardened security.
That said, the biggest risk is still always going to be insiders and former insiders who won't need to crack into the wireless network: they will already know how to get access.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Seriously. We've had a number of standards with names like "Wired Equivalency Protocol" and "Wifi Protected Access" and yet they seem to be falling, one-by-one, to relatively trivial attacks. I'm not saying that WPA is as bad as WEP, but how come they can't copy/paste something as good as good old-fashioned SSL?
SSL has withstood the tests of time, over, and over, and over, and over again. SSL is the gold standard for encryption. It's used on every HTTPS website, it's used for SSH, it's used as part of kerberos, IMAPS, POPS, TLS, and just about every other good-quality security tool.
So why are wireless chipset manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel, when it's widely known that these kinds of wheels are FRIGGEN HARD to re-invent well?
Start with normal, unencrypted wireless. Getting that to work was solved long ago. Embed an SSL engine into your wireless device, with a randomly generated private key. Provide a means to access the public key, and copy/paste that key into your high security wireless driver. If you want to be paranoid, your local driver generates a private/public key pair as well, and that can be copy/pasted to your wireless device.
Done! Now you *KNOW* that if you are accessing the Internet through the driver, you are doing so through the correct wireless hotspot. Who cares about wireless MITM attacks at that point? The SSL protocol *ASSUMES* that there are MITM attempts, and foils them quite effectively, over the equally open and unsecured Internet.
Seriously, folks. This is a problem that was solved over a decade ago. Why are we doing this again?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Using GPUs to crack is not "new", it's a well known tachnique. Furthermore, an increase of a factor a 100 is insignificant relative to the number of years it would take to crack a key, hence the crypto is not weakened, dispelling their whole "death of wireless networking" doommonger bullshit. The only thing this actually does is speed up already feasible attacks against bad passphrases, nothing new, and certainly not a "breakthrough".