[ISN] Once thought safe, WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 06:02:02 -0600 (CST)
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/110608-once-thought-safe-wpa-wi-fi.html

By Robert McMillan
IDG News Service
11/06/2008

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

[...]


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Received on Thu Nov 06 2008 - 04:02:02 PST

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