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Researchers Crack WPA Wi-Fi Encryption

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-they'll-know-my-secrets dept.

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."

4 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cat5

  2. Who uses TKIP instead of AES? by LibertineR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is AES not the more secure of the two? From everything I have read, AES is the preffered option over TKIP.

  3. 'Its just the starting point,' by Keramos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, the headlines blare "WPA is cracked!!!!", but the researchers themselves say they haven't cracked the keys used to encrypt the data and all they have is a "starting point".

    So, how is WPA cracked and useless, again??

    I suppose maybe we'll see at the PacSec conference.

  4. Re:WPA2 is NOT broken by maztuhblastah · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Joe the Pedo cares a lot about getting free untraceable internet access.

    Oh no you don't. If the politicians don't get to use the "think of children" excuse to justify increased surveillance, shredding the Constitution, and guilty-until-proven-innocent, then we don't get to use it as an explanation for our security decisions. Let's not have a double standard here; one standard will do just fine.

    --
    The real litigious bastards...