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Elcomsoft Claims WPA/WPA2 Cracking Breakthrough
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Oct 12, 2008 02:12 PM
from the it-budget-excuse-par-excellence dept.
from the it-budget-excuse-par-excellence dept.
secmartin writes "Russian security firm Elcomsoft has released software that uses Nvidia GPUs to speed up the cracking of WPA and WPA2 keys by a factor of 100. Since the software allows them to network thousands of PCs, this anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks; any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether."
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Looks Like I'm Safe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Looks Like I'm Safe (Score:5, Funny)
"Brute Force Attack will take up to 128299838271 years"
Look, I understand that's enough security for your mortals, but I plan to live forever. I don't want someone getting my data just after my 128,299,838,295th birthday!
Parent
Re:Looks Like I'm Safe (Score:5, Funny)
I don't want someone getting my data just after my 128,299,838,295th birthday!
Tell us if they release Duke Nukem Forever by your 128 billionth birthday.
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Re:Looks Like I'm Safe (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:You can get hard passwords (Score:5, Informative)
I personally recommend KeePass for password generation. It can generate 63 char passwords for WPA/WPA2 keys with cryptographically random unpredictability as it uses keyboard/mouse movements as part of seeding. Because its done on the local machine, there is no chance of the password being leaked as compared over the web. With a 63 character password, that is far more entropy than the 128 or 256 bits keys used for AES, so for someone to guess a password of that length, they either have to be able to brute force AES at full strength, or find a weakness in the algorithm's implementation.
I generate a KeePass password, save it to a USB flash drive, then paste it into my router's config. I then take the USB flash drive to the physical machines and do a copy and paste of the 63 char key into their network preferences. This is a lot easier than typing it. Should I lose the key... not hard to fix -- generate another one and rekey the 3-4 machines on my network. Because the WPA/WPA2 key is easily resettable with physical access to the machines, there is no reason to go less than the maximum character length, and it doesn't matter if the password gets forgotten, as long as you remember your router and machine's access passwords. (This for a home network. Businesses should use a RADIUS server where all the machines are not reliant on a single shared encryption key.)
If you have to use fewer characters, I'd say never use fewer than 20 characters, but even that is cutting it thin, factoring in Moor's law, botnets, and usage of GPUs for additional number crunching.
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Does this surprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't surprise me. Anyone who wasn't already assuming that anything you sent via wireless was already in the hands of your enemies (unencrypted) is a bit naive.
Re:Does this surprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care how you're accessing the net, if it's important encrypt it.
Parent
Rotate your keys (Score:5, Insightful)
With good keys, even a 100x increase in cracking speed is still not fast
Don't use a little 8-character passphrase. Use long keys, and don't just leave them in place forever. Change them periodically.
..since as we know, ... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Newsflash: Most "Business Networks" Aren't Secure (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, the biggest risk is still always going to be insiders and former insiders who won't need to crack into the wireless network: they will already know how to get access.
Thats not really news... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no special flaw or exploit in use. They just throw more transitors at a special problem.
Everybody who really want to crack into some network (think NSA or industrial espionage) could have used FPGAs for even bigger gains.
And for joe sixpack, weeks on a small cluster is still not a viable way for free internet...
Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. We've had a number of standards with names like "Wired Equivalency Protocol" and "Wifi Protected Access" and yet they seem to be falling, one-by-one, to relatively trivial attacks. I'm not saying that WPA is as bad as WEP, but how come they can't copy/paste something as good as good old-fashioned SSL?
SSL has withstood the tests of time, over, and over, and over, and over again. SSL is the gold standard for encryption. It's used on every HTTPS website, it's used for SSH, it's used as part of kerberos, IMAPS, POPS, TLS, and just about every other good-quality security tool.
So why are wireless chipset manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel, when it's widely known that these kinds of wheels are FRIGGEN HARD to re-invent well?
Start with normal, unencrypted wireless. Getting that to work was solved long ago. Embed an SSL engine into your wireless device, with a randomly generated private key. Provide a means to access the public key, and copy/paste that key into your high security wireless driver. If you want to be paranoid, your local driver generates a private/public key pair as well, and that can be copy/pasted to your wireless device.
Done! Now you *KNOW* that if you are accessing the Internet through the driver, you are doing so through the correct wireless hotspot. Who cares about wireless MITM attacks at that point? The SSL protocol *ASSUMES* that there are MITM attempts, and foils them quite effectively, over the equally open and unsecured Internet.
Seriously, folks. This is a problem that was solved over a decade ago. Why are we doing this again?
Re:Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously. We've had a number of standards with names like "Wired Equivalency Protocol" and "Wifi Protected Access" and yet they seem to be falling, one-by-one, to relatively trivial attacks.
"Seem" is the key word in this paragraph.
The claimed attack is nothing more than a brute force search on WPA/WPA2 pre-shared keys, a search that will fail if the keys are well-chosen. It has no effect whatsoever on WPA or WPA2 when used with any of the EAP authentication modes. But PSK requires the network admin to choose a key, and the key is typically chosen by typing in a passphrase. If that passphrase is weak, then given enough computation power an attacker can guess it. Big surprise.
WPA and WPA2 ARE just as solid as SSL. The only difference is that everyone knows that if you're doing SSL you should use a good random number generator to help generate your key pair and to generate the session keys.
Parent
Re:Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
So what you're saying is, since I'm using the longest freagin key that my router allows, and I used a cryptosecure generator to create it (its totally random), I'm more or less safe?
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Re:Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
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Re:Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Better yet, use 802.1x (WPA + RADIUS) which completely avoids all the key-exchange weaknesses of WEP and WPA.
Parent
Re:Why does wireless security suck so bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Almost, but your key may not be as truly random as you might think. Post your key here so we can verify it's really secure.
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F@H (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:F@H (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how long it would take for the entire Folding@Home grid would take to crack a single WAP/WAP2 key. Can anyone do the math?
So that would be Cracking@home?
Parent
Oh, pull the other leg... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is seriously overhyped. #1:
This anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks;
Bullshit. The underlying encryption is based on AES*. AES is not a toy algorithm, and is designed to defend against specialized cracking hardware, and all other known attacks. It is *plenty* strong enough to hold up to a 100X increase in cracking speed, as long as you use good keys, which hopefully you are in a business environment.
I'm willing to believe that a key handling vulnerability might exist in WPA, or a flaw in AES, but the notion that brute force has brought about the death of WPA in business networks is just absurd. At best, this is a reminder to use good keys.
any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether.
Do you think your VPN software has a better underlying algorithm than AES?
* Unless you're using TKIP, which is a toy algorithm, which exists for backwards hardware compatibility, and in my experience isn't used by anyone who cares about security... But even there, the potential attack vectors are through algorithm weaknesses, not brute forcing the keys.
3DES (Score:5, Interesting)
The article says that 3DES has been broken. I think they are mistaken. DES was cracked by a brute force attack but 3DES is still considered secure.
How is their distributed processor system going to crack a 128-bit key that has 128 bits of entropy? Maybe the solution is to update the wi-fi software to make it easier to generate, transport, and install, truly random keys.
Summary is quite silly! (Score:5, Informative)
Businesses that are serious about their security use one of the many types of WPA-Enterprise. The method described in this article only applies to WPA-Personal which is targeted at home users.
Those businesses that do use WPA-Personal can simply institute a policy that requires better passwords to secure them against this exploit.
Some businesses will continue to use WPA-Personal with poor passwords, and that's fine, but those businesses are probably not too worried about security and have many other bigger vulnerabilities.
So, the claim that "this anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks" is ridiculous.
We're okay (Score:5, Funny)
Hah! My company is okay- we're only using MAC filtering for our security, none of this insecure WEP/WPA crap.
Bullshit, FUD and the worst summary I've ever read (Score:5, Insightful)
Using GPUs to crack is not "new", it's a well known tachnique. Furthermore, an increase of a factor a 100 is insignificant relative to the number of years it would take to crack a key, hence the crypto is not weakened, dispelling their whole "death of wireless networking" doommonger bullshit. The only thing this actually does is speed up already feasible attacks against bad passphrases, nothing new, and certainly not a "breakthrough".
yeah right (Score:5, Interesting)
wpa2 with a shared key is only crackable with a brute force attack. Assuming that an alphanumeric character is used for each character of the attack, then for a key of length 8 (the minimum) the attack takes 26+26+10+10=72^8 (lowercase+uppercase+numbers+shifted num keys) time which is 7x10^14. A factor of 100 isn't a big deal - it reduces it to 7x10^12.
Even worse, if the key is longer than the minimum, say 14 digits, then the number of brute force keys are 1x10^26 and improving that to 1x10^24 isn't going to make much of a difference at all.