Re: WEP Password Cracker

On Wed, 05-Apr-2006 at 10:32:06 -0600, Howard R. Hamilton wrote:

> I just had a fellow from some mining survey company walk into the town
> office at LeRoy, and use a password cracker for WEP wireless encryption
> that opened things up in about 3 minutes. Does anyone have an idea of

Yes, WEP isn't useful for much of anything, other than to make it clear
that you don't *intend* the network to be used by the general public.
It can be easily broken by collecting enough packets, and there are
tools that can be used to generate such traffic if there isn't already
enough.

> what he used, and what is needed to defend against this sort of tool?

Well, I think kismet can function as something of an IDS for wireless
networks, and would be able to notice an active attack like that.
However, if you have a sufficiently busy wireless network, a passive
attack will succeed in a reasonable timeframe too, and that you can't
really detect.

What you should do is recognize that WEP really isn't useful. This
means that you should either migrate to WPA (ideally, WPA-EAP with a
central authentication server), or run a VPN over top of the wireless
network, and don't allow any non-VPN traffic off the wireless.
Received on Wed Apr 5 10:43:49 2006