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Download Squad PSA: WPA encryption successfully cracked

by Lee Mathews on November 6, 2008 at 01:15 PM

It may not be typical Download Squad fare, but this morning's news from PC World is important enough to share with our readers.

Researchers Eric Tews and Martin Beck managed to break a TKIP key in about 15 minutes using a non-dictionary attack. It's the first reported chink the in armor for the encryption standard that replaced WEP.

Some of the code used in the attack has made its way into the Aircrack-ng wireless cracking tool, which means Pandora's box is wide open. In the article, Sri Sundaralingam, VP of Airtight Network states "Its just the starting point. Erik and Martin have just opened the box on a whole new hacker playground."

The newer WPA2 standard remains safe, so now may be the time to upgrade your router if it's not supported.

Tags: wep, wireless, wireless security, WirelessSecurity, wpa

Comments

David LamNov 6th 2008 1:44PM

Neutral

Hey man, that's racist ...."Chink" in the armor....

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quantaNov 6th 2008 3:06PM

Neutral

The article does not mention anything regarding WPA-AES. I wonder how secure that is.

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polobunnyNov 6th 2008 4:04PM

Neutral

Still very safe, even though the base of WPA-AES is rather shaky in itself. (WPA '1' was simply not meant to have AES based encryption).
In theory, WPA-AES is almost as secure as WPA2-AES, which is still deemed "uncrackable" to this day.

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kingkool68Nov 6th 2008 8:09PM

Neutral

Thankfully I only use WPA to lockout anyone from connecting to my network. If they manage to know how to crack the encryption, then by golly they deserve access to all of my pre-installed Windows images.

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JoshNov 6th 2008 8:19PM

Neutral

How can you do this? I have heard of BackTrack, but haven't tried it yet. Does anyone have step by step instructions on exactly how to hack WPA and WEP? I don't even know how to use BackTrack yet. Is there a way to do it using windows? If not, how do I go about using linux or backtrack to hack WPA. Anyone's knowledge on all of this would be very helpful! Step by step instructions would be awesome.

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