Once thought safe, WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked
Security researchers say they’ve developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks.
The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.
To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference’s organizer.
They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack
Comments
One Comment on Once thought safe, WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked
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Finley on
Tue, 25th Nov 2008 2:58 am
file encryption software…
I can’t believe I missed this! I’m going to have to do some more reading me thinks….
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