Re: V/Scan for Wireless LANs

From: Nicolas RUFF (lists) (ruff.listsat_private)
Date: Mon Jul 21 2003 - 02:40:44 PDT

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    > There are some tools that will work to try to find a WEP key but they require a lot of data and time.  They exploit known vulnerabilities in the WEP algorithm to find the keys.  However it could take as much as 500 meg of data.  I don't have the links handy.  Sorry.
    > As far as brute forcing.  ok idea but not very doable.  to iterate through all cobinations would be 2^128 possibilities which gets you to about 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38 possible combinations.  If you assumed you could do 1 per second - which would be tough if you wait for DHCP to respond it would take you 10790283070806014188970529154990 years to get through all the combinations.  Thats a long time.  :)  If somebody could check my math that would be great.
    
    	Hello,
    
    Slight mistake here : the first 24 bits of the key are random (sometimes 
    incremental, but most vendors have fixed this by now), but transmitted 
    inside the paquet (this is called Initialisation Vector - IV), whereas 
    the last 40 / 104 bits are derived from one of the WEP key (since the 
    system might use up to 4 WEP keys).
    
    2^40 = 1099511627776
    2^104 = 20282409603651670423947251286016
    
    Since RC4 is a fast algorithm, my P4 1.7GHz processor can check around 
    25,000 k/s, so I guess you can walk trough a 40-bit keyspace in a couple 
    of weeks if you have a cluster a 20 to 30 P4 2.5GHz computers.
    
    There is also a trick that can save you time : some vendors derive the 
    WEP key directly from the ASCII passphrase - that is why you sometimes 
    have to give 5-character or 13-character only passphrases. In this case 
    you only have to check the ASCII printable character range. I 
    successfully manage to crack a 64-bit WEP key using a *single* packet 
    within hours using this trick. However I never tried on 128-bit WEP keys.
    
    Regards,
    - Nicolas RUFF
    -----------------------------------
    Security Consultant
    EdelWeb (http://www.edelweb.fr/)
    Mail : nicolas.ruffat_private
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