Wireless Security

[killersla]

Hello people. Over the past couple of months have been experementing on wireless router security and to see how easy it could be to hack into someones wirless router (ofcourse only using my own to try this).

Now on wireless routers there are 3 types or security

WEP: very easy to crack, i cracked my own router set to WEP in 3 minutes.

WPA & WPA2: Now its alot harder to crack this you have to use something called a brute force attack and try to get something called a 4 way handshake, and within this 4 way handshake will contain the password. Then you have to use a password list to attempt to crack the password.

To give you an idea of how long this can take a standard 10 digit password it can take hundreds of years. Yes that long.

Now along come the russians. A russian firm who specilise in password recovery have descovered a way to increase the speed of a wpa attack by 10,000% this is unreal.

Using the latest nvidia graphics cards and utlasing there super processing power along with the cpu the time has now fallen drmaticlly.

This is a huge upset to big companies they fear the data commisionar will implement new rules of wirless security and will use heavy fines if a company falls victim to the new wpa attack. VPN here we come.

If you want to read more please look here http://www.elcomsoft.com/ewsa.html

they have used a nvida gtx295 as a example. OhOhO im getting one on wednesday. Lol

[Curlyben]

Re: Wireless Security

Nice, but encryption is only ONE method of securing your wireless.
Best to use a multifaceted approach.
So encryption coupled with MAC filtering (hardware address) as well as hiding the SSID (routers/wireless name) works like a dream.

If you can't see the box you are going to have difficulty accessing it

Ps sweeet GPU

[Guest]

Re: Wireless Security

You are misunderstanding the method of attack they use. It is no faster on a single machine. When they talk of "distributed password recovery" they mean that the workload is spread over multiple networked machines using the parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips.

The software supports using up to 10,000 workstations, working in parallel to carry out the attack. It does not speed up the process by a factor of 10,000% however, but instead, by utilising the processing power of the graphics adapter, speeds the process up by a factor of 50 to 100 over simply using the CPU alone.

In addition, this only applies to a dictionary attack, not a brute-force attack and will only be successful if the password being sought is in the dictionary.

As mentioned by Curly above, the best way to ensure a secure network is not to rely on a single method, but to layer your security. Not broadcasting the SSID, using MAC address filtering and choosing a sensible password, consisting of letters, numbers and other characters, both upper and lower case, all work together to create a very secure environment.