WPA Encryption Cracked In 60 Seconds

carusoj writes "Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level. The earlier attack worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm."

Comments

Secure protocols for home wifi?

[tacarat]

TFA lists AES. I'm curious what else is considered useful. Anybody using hacked routers to run tomato and the like are very welcome to discuss their security thoughts.

Re:Time to start working on WPA3?

[smellsofbikes]

Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).

One of the parts of Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" I enjoyed the most was when one character sent another character a message encoded with, as I recall, 4096-bit security, and the character receiving it, while his computer was decoding it, went through the mental gymnastics of comparing the speed of prime factoring algorithms, taking into account Moore's Law and how many new computers were coming online, to conclude that whatever was in the message, it was meant to stay secret for at least 40 years, as opposed to the sender's usual 10 year threshold, making the recipient particularly nervous about the contents.