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Researchers Crack WPA Wi-Fi Encryption
narramissic writes "Researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck 'have just opened the box on a whole new hacker playground, says Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec conference. At the conference, Tews will show how he was able to partially crack WPA encryption in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop. To do this, Tews and Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack. 'Its just the starting point,' said Ruiu."
or is anything worth protecting worth using CAT5 on?
Most banks and government institutions don't use WIFI because of the security vulnerabilities. Granted CAT5 doesn't have have security to access (like wifi tkip/aes key), but it is physically secure, which is at the same level of security as the physical machines themselves.
I find WIFI performance and coverage to be dodgy at best. It's an absolute pain to support.
I have a hard time seeing the point of this, and the rationale behind other similar moves. Here's why:
Firstly, advances in computing power and security research are always going to result in security schemes being broken, but these broken security mechanisms will always be replaced and improved. Provided you keep up to date with current security practices, and as a Slashdot reader, I assume you can and will, you're really not in any danger at all.
Further, there's numerous other security options you can enable both at the wireless level and the network level to further protect your network, alongside good security practices with existing WPA2 (e.g. maximum length WPA key consisting of random characters and numbers). For example, MAC Address whitelisting, a strong password on the AP, and enabling AP configuration changes to occur only through wired connections. A half decent wireless AP should expose all of these options.
This is more than enough to deter all but the most dedicated hacker. I'm not going to pull random statistics out of my behind, but I would wager that only a ridiculously tiny amount of wireless intrusions are done by experienced hackers, and experienced hackers tend to have an agenda beyond "leeching your tubes". The above security options, if all enabled and correctly configured (as in my home network) goes above and beyond what is required to stop the casual or even experienced war driver in their tracks.
But let's say that somehow, they do manage to break your wireless security. Well, if your network is properly set up, they now have another round of security to get through that should be even tougher. Here, digital signing and encryption of all network communications between Windows machines on the domain is required by policy, no exceptions. This is one example of many.
If someone out there is really willing to go to all that effort to break into your HOME network and access your personal data, you have VERY serious problems. From a corporate network perspective, of course, things might be entirely different.
Bottom line: I have a hard time seeing the point of abandoning wireless due to security concerns in home networks, as a properly secured wireless network and home network will easily defeat all but the most determined and skilled hackers.
And finally, why did you buy into wireless at all in the first place if you were so concerned about security? Everyone knew that WEP was rubbish before it was even cracked (which didn't take long). WPA was a vast improvement over WEP, but even it had its flaws, and this was also well known among those concerned. I find it strange that you're getting out of wireless now, when a look at the whole picture shows that wireless security has improved immensely since the initial takeup of wireless. The real problem is people not moving to these new security setups, and staying with WEP or worse.