How To: Wireless Security - Page 5 - Overclock.net

Barky · 03-18-09

Security is like a lock on a door.

They only keep honest people out.

**IEATFISH** · 03-18-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Barky

Security is like a lock on a door.

They only keep honest people out.

There is a lot of truth to that statement. The trick is to make it not worth their while. The more locks, the less someone tries to get in.

carl25 · 03-20-09

maybe say how to get the mac address ? i don't know if you mentioned it or not

start>run>cmd>ipconfig /all

and mac address is under physical address

**IEATFISH** · 03-20-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by carl25

maybe say how to get the mac address ? i don't know if you mentioned it or not

start>run>cmd>ipconfig /all

and mac address is under physical address

It is in the MAC address section of the guide, but thanks for the reminder. Made me go check.

MobAttack · 03-20-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by MCBrown.CA

WEP might as well be unsecured. WPA and WPA2 are marginally better but with the right tools (RTs, wordlists, etc) and a bit of time, they can be cracked fairly easily.

You guys are saying that WEP and WPA are easily cracked, but using the password calculator that IEATFISH mentioned shows that using a 10 character password with just lower case letters will be cracked by a computer trying 500,000 passwords a second in 10 years; a 10 character password using all ASCII characters will be cracked by the same computer in 4.3 million years.

At those numbers, how are WEP and WPA not as secure?

**IEATFISH** · 03-20-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by MobAttack

You guys are saying that WEP and WPA are easily cracked, but using the password calculator that IEATFISH mentioned shows that using a 10 character password with just lower case letters will be cracked by a computer trying 500,000 passwords a second in 10 years; a 10 character password using all ASCII characters will be cracked by the same computer in 4.3 million years.

At those numbers, how are WEP and WPA not as secure?

Well, WPA is far more secure than WEP. There have been recent ways of cracking WPA that are getting more and more efficient. WEP is still by far the easiest. The calculator may be outdated, and it just goes off how long it would theoretically take if you were just guessing passwords. The newer methods I believe have more theory in them then just blind guessing but I'm not 100% sure.

edit: Here is a quote from the calculator:

Quote:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Password Calculator estimates recovery time for Brute-force attack only. Brute-force attack is the worst case, sometimes other more effective recovery methods are available.

Obviously the more common your words are in your password, say blackkitty3, it will be easier than a random combination like lo2hoisuwmb since the brute force usually tries common words first. Thanks for pointing that out, I will add it to the OP.

**stanrc** · 03-20-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by MobAttack

You guys are saying that WEP and WPA are easily cracked, but using the password calculator that IEATFISH mentioned shows that using a 10 character password with just lower case letters will be cracked by a computer trying 500,000 passwords a second in 10 years; a 10 character password using all ASCII characters will be cracked by the same computer in 4.3 million years.

At those numbers, how are WEP and WPA not as secure?

Its because WEP attacks aren't dictionary like WPA, so that calculator isn't a valid comparison. WEP attacks involve exploiting the way WEP works and breaking down packets to find the key (in over simplistic terms).

Also, brute forcing is almost pointless, unless their password is only a few characters long it would take way too long to break it.

Dictionary attacks only work if you have a good dictionary and assume they use a word in your dictionary. If they use intelq6600 as their password its not very likely that your dictionary is going to have it. But if they use dog or password or something else thats just a single word it can probably be found.

MCBrown.CA · 03-22-09

Yes, standard and dictionary brute-force attacks can take a long time. WEP doesn't require this type of attack (just enough unique IVs from captured packets).

The time taken to crack WPA (and many other hashes) can now be reduced to a few minutes with the use of rainbow tables. A rainbow table is basically a huge multiplication table that maps the encryption algorithm so the hash can be traced to its plain-text source. Due to the complexity of encryption algorithms, a 'map' of the tables will be huge. A simple LM hash alphanumeric table is ~60GB.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CodingHorror

From here:

How fast? [Rainbow tables] can crack the password "Fgpyyih804423" in 160 seconds.

**IEATFISH** · 03-23-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by MCBrown.CA

Yes, standard and dictionary brute-force attacks can take a long time. WEP doesn't require this type of attack (just enough unique IVs from captured packets).

The time taken to crack WPA (and many other hashes) can now be reduced to a few minutes with the use of rainbow tables. A rainbow table is basically a huge multiplication table that maps the encryption algorithm so the hash can be traced to its plain-text source. Due to the complexity of encryption algorithms, a 'map' of the tables will be huge. A simple LM hash alphanumeric table is ~60GB.

Great information. The link in response to the quote you provided is also extremely full of information:
http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enou...sword-schemes/

**IEATFISH** · 03-26-09

Bump.

		Overclock.net - Overclocking.net > Software, Programming and Coding > Networking & Security
How To: Wireless Security

03-18-09	#41 (permalink)
Barky Networking Nut Join Date: Mar 2009 Posts: 5 Rep: 0 Unique Rep: 0 Trader Rating: 0	Security is like a lock on a door. They only keep honest people out.

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