Wi-Fi Security: Cracking WPA With CPUs, GPUs, And The Cloud

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[citation][nom]runswindows95[/nom]The 12 pack of Newcastles works for me! Give that to me, and I will set you up on my wifi! Free beer for free wifi![/citation]

Then either beer at your place is really expensive or internet is really cheap. Need 6x12 pack for me.
 
Thanks for another article that obviously took a lot of work to put together. The last couple of articles on WiFi and archive cracking were all excellent reads, and this is a welcome addition.
 
"Why? Because an entire word is functionally the same as a single letter, like "a." So searching for "thematrix" is treated the same as "12" in a brute-force attack."

This is an extremely wrong conclusion. Extremely wrong.
 
What about the permutations of the words?
i.e ape can be written:
ape, Ape, aPe, apE, APe, aPE, ApE, APE.
Thats 2^3=8 permutations. Add a number after and you get (2^3)*(10^1)=80 permutations.
You can write PasswordPassword in 2^16=65536 ways.
How about using a long sentence as a password?
i.e MyCatIsSuperCuteAndCuddly, thats 2^25 permutations :)
 
Any word on MAC address filtering?
Can you scan for the MAC addresses? It's probably easy to get and fake MAC adresses, or it would have been mentioned.


*scans networks*
12 networks here,
1 still using WEP
10 allowing WPA with TKIP
only 1 using WPA2 with AES only (my network)
 
[citation][nom]molo9000[/nom]Any word on MAC address filtering?Can you scan for the MAC addresses? It's probably easy to get and fake MAC adresses, or it would have been mentioned.*scans networks*12 networks here,1 still using WEP10 allowing WPA with TKIPonly 1 using WPA2 with AES only (my network)[/citation]

Same over here. I have a guest though, its a bit weaker than my main network. The guest is a 20 alphanumerical character long WPA2 AES-256bit. My main is 40 character long... Guess I went a bit overboard.
 
[citation][nom]aaron88_7[/nom]"12345, that's amazing, I've got the same combination on my luggage!"Still makes me laugh every time![/citation]

One of the best lines in the movie...
 
[citation][nom]molo9000[/nom]Any word on MAC address filtering?Can you scan for the MAC addresses? It's probably easy to get and fake MAC adresses, or it would have been mentioned.*scans networks*12 networks here,1 still using WEP10 allowing WPA with TKIPonly 1 using WPA2 with AES only (my network)[/citation]

MAC address filtering is a joke, especially if the network actively broadcasts its SSID. Simple reason, MAC address and IP info is not even encrypted when sent over the air. So, wait for legit user to connect, grab his MAC, spoof MAC address and enjoy.
 



If you truly understand programming, then you know that my statement is a comparison of dictionary vs. brute-force attacks. In a dictionary attack, you provide a wordlist, which is used to make unique combination. For a brute-force attack, each letter is randomly selected and joined together in a string. The length of a password has no bearing on the number of KDFs. I suggest that you read Ivan Golubev's blog post and hit up the BackTrack forums if you need help understanding why this is the case.

"Next Big Bang" do you known what moore's law is? that "All (Printable) ASCII characters" 12 character password will be cracked in your lifetime, possibly with the cpu power of your cell phone.
in 1982 we had spectrum zx with a z80 cpu running @3.5mhz. now I've an intel E7-8870 with 10cores running @E7-8870. not to mention like you demonstrated that gpu's are far more powerful cracking passwords. Also you can use other programs, pyrit is not the best for cracking with gpu's. Also you can use rainbow tables.
Your assumption that a WPA2 with 12 characters is safe forever is very wrong and missleading and dangerous. It's the same assumptions that made people believe WEP was ok to use forever. now we can crack wep under 1 minute.
Click to expand...

RISC? That better be distributed if we're going to walk down that path. And as I've explained time and time again, rainbow tables are not valid for this type of attack. I purposely explained why under "Understanding WPA/WPA2."

Second, I'm not sure what you're using but Pyrit is considered the standard by which other brute-force crackers are measured for WPA/WPA2. It's what's used at DEFCON. Our version has some optimizations, but again, it you go to any of the major security conferences, you'll find that it's what people use.

Third, WEP is can be broken with relative ease because it's not a brute-force attack that renders it ineffective. It's a related key attack. Any nondirect attack leverages weaknesses in order to compromise a system. That's a different ballpark. We're dealing with cracking at the lowest common denominator.

What about the permutations of the words?
i.e ape can be written:
ape, Ape, aPe, apE, APe, aPE, ApE, APE.
Thats 2^3=8 permutations. Add a number after and you get (2^3)*(10^1)=80 permutations.
You can write PasswordPassword in 2^16=65536 ways.
How about using a long sentence as a password?
i.e MyCatIsSuperCuteAndCuddly, thats 2^25 permutations :)
Click to expand...

Permutations of words don't count in a dictionary based attack. I mean com'on. :) Let's be reasonable. You're either paranoid at this point or too smart. Though, I'd argue that caps on the first letter is easily defeatable.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
 
All through history people have tried to lock things if someone locks it someone else will figure how to unlock it. It may me mathematically impossible but it's not the only way. Someone will have to know the password and we are fallible.
 
or amateur script kiddies testing their meddle.
Click to expand...
I try to avoid picking on grammar or word errors, since it seems that many of these articles are translated from German. But this is a beauty.

The phrase is usually "testing their mettle," which the dictionary on Yahoo! defines as "Courage and fortitude; spirit." The usual error on this phrase is the substitution of the word "metal" by spell checkers, dictation software, or people who don't know the origin of the phrase.

But since these kiddies do indeed "meddle" with out networks, our data, and our lives, the substitution works elegantly.
 
Man sucks for all you people who live close enough to there neighbor to worry about their password being hacked. My nearest neighbor is more than 200m away, and than I live in a brick house, so it barely goes out the windows. It would be pretty obvious if some dude was standing outside my house accessing my files.
 
Why don't they limit the number of authentication attempts like you said in the article like banks? Wouldn't that kill all attempts at brute force hacking?
 
All is takes is 1 non-common letter substitution to make a simpler (but not short) password avoid a word list. Then it's back to searching the whole key space. I only mention this because making your password so complex, you end up writing it down or re-using it is worse than making it slightly less than fully random. I prefer medium phrases with 2-3 randomly swapped in/inserted symbols and numbers. Maybe with some word part capitalized. Something like hun.ryHI5ppo (a bastardization of hungry hippo) can be memorized but isn't "fully random."

Also, do you have an idea of what the FPGA's speed would be like in comparison? Or for that matter speculation on other upcomming hardware? I'm thinking of stuff Nvidia and Intel are throwing at HPC etc. Also moore's law.
 
What you quickly notice is that the weakest link isn't the security system but the user / person involved. People talk about 10,20,40 character passwords, those mean absolutely nothing if the characters are alphanumeric words. A dictionary based attack can crack those much faster then a truly random password.

And in all honestly, why are we using "passwords" with a network encryption system. Just generate a random sequence of ASCII characters and use that again. The best method would be to directly generate the key in binary and just import it into the encryption system.
 
Before I'd secure my neiborhoods networks while I do tweaks/repairs for them, most were using WEP, some didn't protect their wi-fi at all and I was the only one behind a WPA2 protected network. Now a few years later, on 26 networks detected in my livingroom, no neighbor networks are unprotected, 3 uses WEP, all other uses WPA/WPA2.

Since I helped configure every router I've put my hands on, my neighborhood is much more secure than it was only years later. So I'm happy to see WPA2 won't be crackable in the near future. ^-^
 
Total search time is a worst-case scenario. On the average, you should crack the code in half that time or less?
 
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