GPUs Used To Crack WiFi Passwords Faster

MojoKid writes "Russian-based ElcomSoft has just released ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor 1.0, which can take advantage of both Nvidia and ATI GPUs. ElcomSoft claims that the software uses a 'proprietary GPU acceleration technology,' which implies that neither CUDA, Stream, nor OpenCL are being utilized in this instance. At its heart, what ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor does is perform brute-force dictionary attacks of WPA and WPA2 passwords. If an access point is set up using a fairly insecure password that is based on dictionary words, there is a higher likelihood that a password can be guessed. ElcomSoft positions the software as a way to 'audit' wireless network security."

Comments

Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[morgan_greywolf]

But brute force-password guessing isn't a problem if you a choose a long enough password with a large enough character set - letters, numbers, symbols. My WPA password is larger than 15 characters. Good luck without a Beowulf cluster of those -- and even then, it better have a LOT of those GPUs.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

My WPA password is larger than 15 characters.

Isn't best practice greater than 32 for WPA? The maximum is 63 I believe.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[sakdoctor]

Since you generally never have to type a WPA key in, might as well go for maximum entropy.

https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Spazztastic]

Since you generally never have to type a WPA key in, might as well go for maximum entropy.

https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

Or not even using something that is transmitted over the internet and is TRULY random:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=200 count=1 | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+'; echo

Credits go to someone from the Stupid (Useful) Linux tricks thread.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Shakrai]

I question the wisdom of relying on a third party website to generate passwords for you. At least they are using ssl but how do you know they aren't keeping those passwords? How do you know they are generating them with real entropy?

Diceware is a better bet, IMHO. You can generate them offline and with a good set of dice you get real entropy. You can use the instructions on that webpage to generate totally random passwords or to generate passwords with words in them that are easy to remember but still pretty secure/random.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[morgan_greywolf]

I hadn't heard that, but a totally random 63 character password would be ideal, yes. Note that I didn't say how much greater it is than 15. ;) But anything over 15 characters is probably secure enough for most home users.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be picky but you would need to use /dev/random and have enough entropy to make this TRULY random (assuming we live in a non-deterministic universe).

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[jellomizer]

guessmypassword
123456789111111
                  012345

isn't a good password.
Most Brute Force attacks are a little smarter then 1,2,3,.....,ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Lets go threw the dictionary first (Caps on, Caps Off and caps with the first letter and without it).
Lets go threw the dictionary and followed by numbers between 0,99999999
Do the same with the numbers prefix the dictionary word.
Try Numeric Combinations.
Try Alpha Combinations.
Finally try everything else.

So by adding More CPU's You can crack most passwords in usable order of magnitude faster.

All the GPU is really doing is just working as an addition processor array for calculations. No big deal everyone though about using them for parallel processing once they got near the power of most CPUs.
It is just using them for evil purpose.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[AlXtreme]

Or not even using something that is transmitted over the internet and is TRULY pseudorandom:

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Shakrai]

But anything over 15 characters is probably secure enough for most home users.

15 characters using the full set of letters/numbers/symbols on your keyboard works out to ~98 bits of entropy. That's probably sufficient. I usually use at least 20 characters (~131 bits) but that's probably just my paranoia. If you are worried about somebody breaking a password that secure then you have bigger problems than your neighbor using your wi-fi connection. In this case I hope you are paying your team of armed guards well and trust that they won't betray you ;)

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[necro81]

I question the wisdom of relying on a third party website to generate passwords for you. At least they are using ssl but how do you know they aren't keeping those passwords? How do you know they are generating them with real entropy?

If you are worried about it, but still don't want (or for some reason, can't) generate a random character string locally, you could always have the website generate several passwords, then combine them yourself in some random way. For instance, you could swap blocks from each string, or reverse the order of one of them and XOR the characters together.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[morgan_greywolf]

Assuming you have it compiled into kernel, yes. (Most modern distros do)

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[MasterOfMagic]

Take anything that Steve Gibson claims with at least a grain of salt, preferably a whole shaker.

This is the same person that flat out accused Microsoft of putting the WMF exploit in Windows purposely so they'd have a way to get into any system. He had to backpeddal quickly from that claim.

Pardon me if I don't trust his judgment or his code.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets go threw the dictionary first ...
Lets go threw the dictionary and ...

Please quit throwing dictionaries. Those things are heavy and they hurt.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[radish]

For something like a WPA passphrase (it's not really the key) the actual amount of "randomness" isn't important provided whatever you use isn't in whatever dictionary the attacker is using. Once the dictionary attack is exhausted they're going to have to move onto simple one-by-one testing, and being "more random" or "less random" has no real meaning. Eventually they'll hit the right one, it's just a matter of how long that takes, which is a matter of luck and what order they test them in :)

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[ShieldW0lf]

Maybe I'm dense, but how the hell does flooding a wireless card with brute force dictionary attacks bottleneck on computation speed? You create your dictionary, once, you stick it on a hard drive, you stream it at your target through the wireless networking card, you wait.

This product seems like a bunch of bullshit to me. Even if they did come up with some particularly clever algorithm for creating more effective dictionaries and speed it up GPUs, there's no need to recreate a dictionary every time you're doing a brute force attack.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[buchner.johannes]

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=200 count=1 | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+'; echo

Don't use that, I use that as a password already!

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[wastedlife]

From the product website:

Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor works completely in off-line, undetectable by the Wi-Fi network being probed, by analyzing a dump of network communications in order to attempt to retrieve the original WPA/WPA2-PSK passwords in plain text.

TFA is misunderstanding the way the app functions, it listens to the network until a certain amount of information has been sent, then attempts to decrypt that data locally. Sending wave after wave of login attempts is easily detectable and would almost certainly bottleneck somewhere at the network level before CPU.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[dubbreak]

You can generate them offline and with a good set of dice you get real entropy.

I think we have a different definition of "good set of dice". My set of dice are "good" if they roll 20's consistently.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[cbiltcliffe]

Your last guess is pretty close.

You intercept a few packets of data from the wireless network and save them. Then, you bugger off to your evil lair, and set about trying to crack them with your dictionary list.

But the algorithm that WPA uses is non-reversible. It's also run 4096 times.
So to crack it, you take the first line in your dictionary, throw in the network's SSID (this is included for better security. Passphrase: 12345 will hash differently on a network named linksys than it will on a network named dlink), run it through the WPA algorithm the 4096 times, truncate the result at 256 bytes, then compare that 256 bytes to the captured packets.
If they don't match, go on to the next line in your dictionary.
If they do match, you've got your passphrase.

My Athlon64 laptop does just shy of 200 passphrases/second like this. My current audit dictionary is somewhere on the high side of 48 million words.
Obviously, speeding this up in any way is going to decrease your audit time significantly.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[cbiltcliffe]

I question why the hell anybody needs to have someone/something else generate a random password for them.

Can't you do it yourself? You've got 5 fingers on 1 hand. You've got a second hand. You've got a keyboard.

Just go KJNo867f*P7gP*&%o86fv:(O*& for shit's sake.

Re:Brute-force password guessing not a problem

[plover]

The old (very old) password cracking programs I've played with allow the user to set up rules to guide guesses. You'd fill out a series of patterns, and if possible base them on passwords you know your target has used in the past. For example, I knew a friend commonly substituted digit 1 for letter i, so added a rule of s/i/1/ to the list of modifications to dictionary words. (I eventually found his password was k3rm1t.)

Like most things, the answer of "is your security weaker" is "it depends". You certainly aren't doing yourself any security favors by telling us you might have a movie quote as a pass phrase, even in an example. This is information that may have made your router's password significantly more guessable.

First of all, I'd want to physically locate you first to avoid wasting time cracking the wrong router. That should be fairly easy. Tools like Google and Wigle might help me narrow it down to exactly you. I'd start guessing with the notion that you might use a quote from a movie as your pass phrase, or perhaps the first letters of a quote as a pass phrase. A script running through IMDB could theoretically yield the quote your current pass phrase is based on, and there are dozens of web pages devoted to movie quotes of just about every genre. I'd start with quotes from movies featuring Samuel Jackson, anime movies, and episodes of American Dad and South Park. I would guess you'd write it in all lower case, but anotherTestWithCamelCase is cheap. I know you might also separate the words with some common symbol/number pairs, and that you've done them in 1-2-3 order, so I would add various rules to test the movie phrases that way. Twice in your examples above you've post-fixed a symbol/number to your phrases, so I'd add that pattern, too.

Failing to find your pass phrase among the movie quotes, I'd move on to video game quotes and slang, maybe some Ozzie lyrics or other metal lyrics, CD liner notes, and possibly even some quotes from literature. The point is the GPU is screamingly fast, and can try billions of permutations of each of these, and the real bottleneck would likely be having to scoop up all these sources of quotations from the net.

Now, given that you're posting to Slashdot, I'm hoping you'd be a bit more clever than all this, and you've posted the above as a pile of misdirection. I'd only give myself about a 5% chance of actually guessing your pass phrase, even with the tools above and the hints you provided. But those are a hell of a lot better odds than trying to guess a truly random password. The other thing working in your favor is that you're pretty young and thus likely broke, so no serious criminals have the profit motivation to hunt you down and start hacking away at your wireless. Now, if you were "Senator Adams from the Great State of New Jersey," or "Millionaire Adams, the Sausage King of Newark," then there'd be a bit more incentive. That's what happened to both Palin and Obama.

The thing you should take away from this is: it wouldn't hurt to change your passphrase right now to some cryptographically random value. You've likely given away too much information already. But the chances are greater that nobody really cares what your pass phrase is. :-)

Auditions

[Thanshin]

Heavy machine guns!

Audit your neighbors' dodge skills.

Full disclosure

[plover]

People who whine about these being "irresponsible" or "bad for security" always seem to forget that the bad guys may already have written stuff like this and are putting it to use. By publishing this software, it makes everyone aware that it's never safe to turn a blind eye to poor security practices.

If some security manager reads this, goes back to work, and says "OK, change all our WPA passwords, our current ones may not be secure", he will be making a real improvement to his network. He might even be locking out an existing hacker in the process.

Re:Full disclosure

[kabocox]

If some security manager reads this, goes back to work, and says "OK, change all our WPA passwords, our current ones may not be secure", he will be making a real improvement to his network. He might even be locking out an existing hacker in the process.

Until 10 minutes later the CEO calls the head of IT and has them change the WAP password back to Password1 so he can log in. It's nearly a known fact that managers can't type passwords longer than 8 characters successfully. 16 character or longer passwords become difficult for field IT guys to type. o.k. was that new password ffffffddddddcccccc222222555555? I mean it's difficult enough to get them to use their kid's name plus a number as a password and you want a security consult to change a working system because it might be insecure? Damn.

Every system and facility is insecure if you put enough force into cracking it. We've got an offsite gym/vehicle storage building where the only security is a vericard to get the door and a key for the back. There is a stand alone laptop of little value out there, but there is several thousand dollars of gym equipment there. What level of force/ability do you really think that it would take to clone/spoof a vericard and then load up alot of that equipment onto a semi? The reason that we don't employ a full time guard or have the place monitored by 4-8 DVR cameras is that those in charge of the budget don't think that its worth that amount of effort to protect. But even if you had a guard and cameras, how much money do you think it would take to bribe the guard and disable/by pass the cameras? With enough resources/effort anything is possible.

This is true but misleading

[Scott Lockwood]

The real problem is using WPA with pre-shared keys - that's what this can really do some damage with. That, and they used it to set up a fake root CA. Um, this is almost a month old. WTF? Slashdot: Where you hear it last!

OpenCL

[Adam Hazzlebank]

I'd say it's particularly unlikely that it's using OpenCL seeing as there are no working implementations yet (unless someone knows better?)

Generating Passwords

[KiwiCanuck]

Isn't there a way of taking a prime number and converting it to ascii? I'm not a software guy, so I use to go to computer services (when I was in uni) and get them to generate a password for me. I have accumulated 8 passwords. Now I just rotate through them. Is this a good idea? Cheers for any advice.

Re:does it count as 0day?

[plague3106]

What's illegal about it? If you're using it against your own network to test the strenght of your settings, I see nothing wrong with that. The question isn't why can they sell this legally, but why WOULDN'T they be able to do so? Given that any tool can always be used in bad ways, I don't think that should be enough to outlaw the tool itself.

Great Program

[JimmyRay_TWTV]

I tested this program for a upcoming show and I really liked it. The cost is high for most regular folks, so it is geared more towards Government/Commercial. For a nice open source option, I also recommend Pyrit. I had a few issues importing Aircrack files, but most of those have been resolved.

Brute Force?

[Fnord666]

... does is perform brute-force dictionary attacks of WPA and WPA2 passwords.

I tried using a non brute force dictionary attack on an encryption key once. I just tried every third word in the dictionary. It didn't seem to work as well as trying them all. In other words, there are brute force attacks and there are dictionary attacks, but there are no brute force dictionary attacks.

formulas make brute-force password guessing easy!

[Medievalist]

You need letters, numbers and symbols. Mixed case also.

If you follow such a formula black hats know more about your password than if you don't, so their brute force attacks from 10,000 node botnets just got exponentially faster. You made the key space smaller when you eliminated all possible passwords that do not contain letters, numbers, symbols and mixed case.

My password is also not based on a dictionary word and means something only to me.

That's a far better strategy.

Myself, I ignore all "rules" and "formulas" for password generation and use 64 characters or more for important passwords. Until this became possible (I'm old) I always used the maximum number of characters allowed (so old, I had to use six-character passwords for decades).

Back in the day, college students and security auditors used to routinely brute passwords without dictionaries because MVS and RSX had such short passwords.

It counts as a tool, like a hammer or pocketknife.

[Medievalist]

they can legally sell this because...

They live in a culture that has more commercial freedom than yours, apparently. Given that they are in Russia, that's a sad commentary on wherever you live.

why? just because they claim to be an 'auditor' means they can profit from a cracker?

Because it's a tool. You can cave people's heads in with a hammer, you can assassinate the pope with a kitchen knife. They are tools, they have no moral dimension. Even a thumbscrew can be used for moral purposes, such as a doorstop that keeps cute fuzzy puppies from running on to train tracks.

Effective tools amplify your ability to do things you want to do. They don't make it necessary or possible for you to commit crimes; your will and your circumstances are what makes you a criminal.

I have used wifi crackers to audit networks in my workplace with the full knowledge of my employer. I have never used one to commit a crime, ever. It's just a tool.