Jack Simmons wrote:
> I read that WPA wireless encryption has been hacked and should not be used.
> True?
>
>
Yes and no.
There are basically 3 encryption standards available to home wifi users,
WEP, WPA, and WPA2. By 2001, WEP encryption could be defeated in about
1 or 2 hours using a regular consumer laptop. More recently, that time
dropped to about 50 seconds. If you are at all concerned about
security, don't use WEP.
WPA is considerably stronger than WEP, and until recently, the main
attack was to repeatedly guess passwords. Using a strong password is the
main defense to this sort of attack.
A few days ago, a paper was published describing a method of attacking
WPA. The authors claim to be able to break WPA with about 12-15 minutes
of access to a WPA-protected network. There are, however, two "flavors"
of WPA.
In order to permit WEP-capable systems to be firmware or driver
upgradable to WPA, one type of WPA uses a technique called TKIP, which
is a modification of the technique used in WEP. WPA-TKIP is the type of
WPA that is the subject of the paper.
The attack described will not work on the other type of WPA, which is
called WPA-AES. AES is a much stronger encryption algorithm than the
one used with WPA-TKIP. AES is also used in WPA2.
The attack is not complete decryption of all transmissions, but is still
worrying.
Thus, if your hardware permits, use WPA2-PSK or WPA-PSK (AES). If your
hardware only permits WPA-PSK (TKIP), then the authors of the paper
suggest lowering the rekeying interval from the usual default of 3600
seconds to 120 seconds or less.
For further info, see
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed...-cracked.ars/2
--
Lem -- MS-MVP
To the moon and back with 2K words of RAM and 36K words of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
http://history.nasa.gov/afj/compessay.htm
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