RE: Cracking WEP and WPA keys

["Shenk, Jerry A" <jshenk () decommunications com>]

Cracking WEP depends on a ton of stuff.  If you're cracking it looking
for weak IVs, you'll need an AP that has weak IVs.  Most of the new ones
avoid them to one degree or another.  What AP are you using?  I used a
Linksys in my initial testing (a couple years ago) and cracked the key
in 4 hours.  I also tried to crack a Cisco 350 (replaced by the 1200
series) and never was able to crack the key using that method, even
after running for days.

Another thing, that "crack in seconds" is based on already having hours
or days worth of traffic to use.

There are some new tools that generate traffic rather than having to
wait for it and some of the new cracking methods are better or worse,
depending on your perspective.  I think some of these "WEP is worthless"
stories are overly sensational.  Yes, WEP is broken, ok, possibly even
horribly broken but it stops a 'casual connector', it even stops quite a
few determined hackers (it stopped you;).  If you're the NSA...ok, WEP
is worthless....the people attacking you are determined, well financed
professionals.  If you're my mom, checking her e-mail from home with a
wireless laptop, I think WEP is perfectly fine.  Installing everything
needed for a good PEAP implementation for my mom is absolutely insane.
Most people are gonna be someplace in the middle where a little bit of
risk evaluation is in order.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Wood [mailto:dninja () gmail com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 5:09 AM
To: pen-test () securityfocus com
Subject: Cracking WEP and WPA keys

Hi
I've just been on a wireless security course where there was a lot of
talk
about WEP keys being poor security and easily crackable. I got home and
decided to put it to practice and use aircrack against my own WEP key.

Using airodump and aireplay I collected 1 million IVs and set aircrack
off
attacking it. After around 4 hours I got bored of waiting and on another
machine tried playing with aircracks debug option where you can pass
sections of the key you already know. I found if I passed the whole key
except the last digit it could be cracked with a fudge factor of 2, if I
removed the last 2 digits then I had to up the fudge factor to 5 and up
it
to 8 if I removed the last 3 digits. With anything less than the fudge
factor mentioned I was told that it couldn't crack the key.

All the examples I've seen seem to suggest that cracking should take
minutes
not hours and all keys should be crackable. What experiences do other
testers have? Have I done something wrong? I abandoned the full attack
after
5 hours as it was running with the default fudge factor of 2 so would
probably not have managed to crack the key.

I've also seen a video on the Remote Exploit site showing a WPA key
cracked
in 10 minutes using cowpatty and a dictionary attack. How realistic is
this?

Robin

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Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner:

Hackers are concentrating their efforts on attacking applications on your
website. Up to 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts, forms,
login pages, dynamic content etc. Firewalls, SSL and locked-down servers are
futile against web application hacking. Check your website for vulnerabilities
to SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other web attacks before hackers do!
Download Trial at:

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