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WPA2 Wireless Security Crackable WIth "Relative Ease"
An anonymous reader writes "Achilleas Tsitroulis of Brunel University, UK, Dimitris Lampoudis of the University of Macedonia, Greece and Emmanuel Tsekleves of Lancaster University, UK, have investigated the vulnerabilities in WPA2 and present its weakness. They say that this wireless security system might now be breached with relative ease [original, paywalled paper] by a malicious attack on a network. They suggest that it is now a matter of urgency that security experts and programmers work together to remove the vulnerabilities in WPA2 in order to bolster its security or to develop alternative protocols to keep our wireless networks safe from hackers and malware."
This sounds like the classic de-auth, handshake capture, then brute force attack.
It's still a bitch to crack without G.O. resources. Moxie has a service that will try for you...
Reads article...
Longer passwords make brute force cracking more difficult... Possible attack vector via the wireless de-authentication and re-authentication that WPA2 connections maintain for clients... With potential fast scanning and proper spoofing, an intruder could knife their way it...
Why does this feel like nothing new?
How do you keep something you never had?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I already have to tell friends and family to use a alphanumeric password not based on a dictionary word - I was helping a friend find out why her wireless charges were so high, and using backtrack and some basic documentation - (knowing almost nothing about wireless security) - I was able to find out her wireless password based on the fact she was using a regular word in my dictionary list
wireless = never safe
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I understand this is about recovering the PSK. This would mean that authentication using a certificate, such as EAP-TTLS is still safe. Correct?
Once quantum computing fully arrives, I guess encryption will be mostly moot.
Bad guess
Someone had to do it.
Brute force attacks compromise simple passwords?
This is news?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The only reason I encrypt my wifi connections is to prevent casual wanderers from connecting to my network and sucking up bandwidth. Any data that needs securing is encrypted by the computer, not by the modem/router.
If I could get proper password protection without the encryption, I wouldn't bother encrypting the traffic. I could care less who snoops it -- so long as they're not sucking up bandwidth.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
WPA2 keeps the neighbors from eating mah bandwich?
Try "it keeps people from injecting exploits into your computer by impersonating web servers." Be glad you enabled it.
Someone had to do it.
MAC filtering does nothing useful. You're shouting your MAC from the rooftops any time you're connected to the network, so cloning it is exercise in triviality for any attacker with an IQ greater than their hat size.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Just when you thought you've sharpened your spear to the finest, your opponent has fortified his shield to the fullest.
OTP FTW
If you are even the slightest bit concerned with the security of data on your network, isolate wireless completely from your secure data. In my very unscientific estimate it seems 90%+ of the usefulness of wireless is for just basic internet access for executive types anyhow who don't need to be checking production data.
Just use a one time pad. It's perfectly secure, even to quantum cryptography as long as the source is truly random. Creating a truly random number generator that takes advantage of quantum effects is not terribly difficult. Many modern CPUs now have this support built-in. The only weak point is how you get the one time pad to both locations and that it can only be used once. Even this is possible by having multiple pads sent via different methods and XORing them together at the destination. In order to crack it all copies would have to be intercepted and copied though additional security measures could be added to make even this difficult.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Ooops. I'm going to have to get a smaller hat.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
No, that's SSL.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Because SSL on Open WiFi is fool proof....
He was correct. While you are also correct, you failed to see the attack vector. If the network is not secure, your SSL may not be effective, at least not for all users.
One-time pad truly means one-time pad however. That means a new pad for every single transmission - that's why it becomes untenable.
On the other hand, the way network encryption works is typically this:
(1) Use asymmetric encryption once to securely deliver the remote computer the key to a symmetric algorithm.
(2) Use the symmetric key for the remainder of the communication.
It's possible that RSA is compromised, or that a G.O. has the means to cracking it via an unpublished mathematical discovery, but there are other asyms out there.
One type pads can work for some things. maybe companies will send you a credit card sized device containing gigibytes of random pad data that you can use to communicate with that company.
What has limited the attack number in WPA-PSK? That's the question I have after reading all the data that is freely available. From what I know and can gather about this, the researchers found a way to reduce the amount of brute forcing required to guess the key in WPA-PSK. They used something in the de-auth and probably re-auth after that to gather information about the key to do so.
Paywalling this information is a bad thing. Either do a full disclosure, or keep it secret and notify all vendors that are vulnerable. What we have now is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The result will be that the bad guys will find out how it's done and implement a practical attack that we don't know how to detect or defend against. Alternatively, a white-hat will find out or pay for the article and publish it. That will probably result in the white-hat getting sued for leaking the information in the article. Regardless what will happen, this is probably the worst way to tell the world of a security vulnerability in a product used world wide by over a billion people.
Universities should stop requiring publication in papers that aren't free to read, or free to publish in. The quality of the paper is of secondary importance to the magazine if people have to pay to get published. The reach to people for which the research is relevant is limited if the audience has to pay for reading the article. In my opinion, requiring at least three positive peer reviews from other universities or something similar, would be a much better way to make sure that research is up to standards and relevant than a short list of places that will publicise a paper. Reviewing papers from other universities should be part of the mandatory tasks students have to fulfil in order to be allowed to write their own paper.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
MAC filtering even lowers security. Some lazy crackers might have not changed their MAC when they are attacking and it could be easier to identify them next time. When they are spoofing MACs they use your own MACs which they see on your network. You basically (could) lose information about the attackers. And this is bad.
I can imagine a VPN server with a rack of slots for those (Probably just read-only USB mass storage interface). Give one to the VPN, one to the person going on their trip or working at home. You'd need to send out a new key every now and again, but if a key is good for a couple of months (Doable) then it becomes quite reasonable.
It's called 802.11w and introduces encryption on management frames (so de-auth attack is out), this problem is solved. It's up to vendors/developers to implement it.
SSL is designed to operate over insecure networks. That's the idea.
"moot", you keep using that work like that. It doesn't mean what you think it does.
Why are you asking me? You know damn well where my papers are.
www.wavefront-av.com
WPA2 keeps the neighbors from eating mah bandwich?
Try "it keeps people from injecting exploits into your computer by impersonating web servers." Be glad you enabled it.
How about "it keeps you from being hauled off to jail by some really mean feds because someone used your wireless to download kiddie porn"? *That* most people can easily understand.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
This article is a really takes a really roundabout way to tell you computers are getting faster...
TFAbstract says that WPA2 can be cracked with brute force search, and that long passwords are more secure than short ones. Looking up the home pages of these internationally renowned researchers http://www.brunel.ac.uk/bbs/pe... http://issel.ee.auth.gr/people... http://www.research.lancs.ac.u... reveals that these three claim no other security-focused publications. But perhaps I'm too quick to judge. Somebody pay the man and read their paper. Or is this the two-step get-rich-quick scheme?: - (1) Publish Paywalled Article Exposing Security Holes in Commonly-Used Security Protocol (2) Profit! (PPAESHiCUSP-P)
Call me paranoid, but I don't think it would be safe to assume the 3 letter agencies haven't already co-opted the design of the modern CPU random number generators.
I think it's unlikely. When news of FreeBSD not trusing Intel's random number generator I decided to look at the RTL of one of the CPUs my employer makes which is optimized for security applications. The random number generator works exactly as the documentation says it does using the jitter of 125 of 128 ring oscillators feeding into a SHA1 engine with other unique inputs.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
And as stated, is no more invulnerable to remote attacks than password data (which has already been shown to be frequently all too easily accessible).
The OTP data must be accessible to the service you're connecting to which in turn is open to attacking from the outside. OTPs are not special when you use them with online services that aren't fully hardened.
In fact, I don't think it would be hard to argue that the traditional randomly-generated key system protected by public keys is in fact more secure because of its lack of replayability when properly implemented.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Would you please identify the CPU?
Cavium OCTEON series of CPUs. http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-I...
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Try to have an effective browsing experience with port 80 blocked.
Someone had to do it.
MAC filtering should only be used as a herd immunity measure: people who don't update their AV are less likely to find it easier to spoof an existing MAC address than they find it to register in a captive portal and download their updates before they are allowed in.
Someone had to do it.
That's very impressive. What do those cost? I wonder how much to build a basic system around that chip.
They're not designed for systems but for embedded devices like firewalls, VPNs, routers, NAS, etc. They're expensive and have some very nice engines in them as well, such as the gzip engine that's 100 times as fast as software implementations, hardware pattern matching (regex) engines and content addressable memory support for firewalls and anti-virus, RAID engines for NAS to do RAID 5/6 calculations in hardware, encryption and hashing instructions, not to mention built-in support for 10 and 40Gbps Ethernet with a lot of packet acceleration. The chip of course will run Linux (Debian) and applications that run directly on top of the cores without an OS underneath for bare metal performance. The single threaded performance is a fair bit lower than an X86 based system which is why there are so many cores running in parallel. There's also a lot of special support for synchronization between the cores and various atomic instructions that have been added.
While it is fully compatible with standard 64-bit MIPS there are a lot of additional instructions since MIPS allows you to do that (ARM does not allow manufacturers to add custom instructions).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.