WPA2 wireless security cracked

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140320100824.htm

by npongratz • 12 years ago

27 13 12 years ago

Wireless networking is/has always had potential for infiltration. It is inherent since the signal is broadcast out without any regard to who is listening. This security flaw, using brute force, is a good, if slow, way to exploit the open nature of WiFi. They do not specify any timing for breaking a psk so I assume this isn't very fast. And the article doesn't state if the brute force can only be attempted while the back door is temporarily open. Security threat yes. How long to break, who knows.

A great reason to use wired when you can!

sown• 12 years ago

I've wondered about using SSH socks proxy on my devices to help get around this. Even if they break WPA2 they'd deal with SSH traffic only.

For example, it seems reasonable that I could have my laptop or phone use a ssh tunnel and it can only go to my wireless router. The router will only accept SSH traffic with a certificate and route traffic to an SSH somewhere on my wired network, or from the router itself.

At work I do something similar. I setup a firefox profile (firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote) to use SOCKS proxy on some port and setup SSH to connect to an EC2 instance I have lying around (ssh -i cert.file ec2-user@ec2.machine -ND 8888). This way I can browse sort of in private. :p

FYI: Some sites like craigslist or redfin reject ec2 traffic.

noonespecial• 12 years ago

This is a perfect use case for openvpn. I use it whenever I connect to a public wifi to spare me worrying about how secure it may or may not be.

coreymgilmore2• 12 years ago

ssh is an interesting option. I had not thought of that. I would, rather, go VPN route though. It is east to use an open VPN service on a protected, but public, WiFi network.

mdaniel• 12 years ago

That's a great system, and I love that OpenSSH has a SOCKS proxy in it (and I make use of it quite a bit).

I wanted to comment on your ec2 traffic observation and make you aware of Digital Ocean machines if you were not already aware. Not only are they inexpensive but D.O. offers quite a few egress points from their data centers. I also believe that their hosts have individual public IP addresses, which may help further reduce the chance of being blocked wholesale.

Granted, the IP addresses are still clearly identifiable as D.O. machines, so if those services want to filter out "data center traffic" they still can but you might fly under the radar as compared to EC2 traffic.

thaumaturgy• 12 years ago

I'm confused; I thought this was a known flaw in WPA2 (see e.g. http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=cracking_wpa). Can anybody explain what's new about this?

loucal2• 12 years ago

yeah, this is interesting to me as well. I first heard of this method about a decade ago. The bibliographic info says:

Achilleas Tsitroulis, Dimitris Lampoudis, Emmanuel Tsekleves. Exposing WPA2 security protocol vulnerabilities. International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2014; 6 (1): 93 DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2014.059797

I got on the Inderscience website to see what they charge for a subscription to this journal, but when I clicked the 'Subscription Price' link it hung, and now the whole site is strangely down for me...

Perhaps expensive journals are having trouble finding original content in our culture of openness?

r-u-serious• 12 years ago

Perhaps expensive journals are having trouble finding original content in our culture of openness?

Apparently: http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120...

adenner• 12 years ago

Are there any wifi standards that are actually "secure" that are available for soho users? (Short of the ssh/open VPN solution)

yuhong• 12 years ago

Deauth is a not a new attack.

vicaya• 12 years ago

Is this something new or the good ole' hole196?

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/07/wifi-hole196-major-e...

gaelow• 12 years ago

Behold! Some "researcher" just updated his Wifiway for the first time in the last 2 years and realized it comes now with a `crack WPA2` feature! "What's this all about?" He asked to a couple of fellow "researchers". "Oh yeah, it seems we can capture the handshake and try to bruteforce the PSK now. And there is a couple of deauth attacks to force the handshake too!" Now the two-step get-rich-quick scheme, as a fellow slashdot user commented, comes to play:

(1) Publish Paywalled Article Exposing Security Holes in Commonly-Used Security Protocol

(2) Profit!

WPA2 wireless security cracked

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