FBI break 128bit WEP in 3 mins

Rew

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article111.php

At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys.

This article will be a general overview of the procedures used by the FBI team. A future article will give step-by-step instructions on how to replicate the attack.

Martyr

I thought when i saw the topic with "FBI" in the sentence that it was odd, odd that a government agency would publicly show everyone how to crack WEP.
And i thought they would treat us all to some elaborate scheme that no one had ever used before.. like some new crypto technique.
It seems that they just use tools available to anyone out there that wants them and now i don't understand why they are even telling us.

I mean, if that were someone else, everyone would be up in arms talking about how lame they are, and yet just because they are the FBI, its a big deal.

tck

It's to inform people how insecure WEP is and not to use it, use WPA instead.

They said they will be releasing a 'How to' - i'd like to take a look at it for sure.

po0k

Thing is, alot of consumers (and probably alot of Small-to-Medium Businesses will implement WPA-PSK instead of full-on WPA, which isn't a whole lot better than WEP.

Rew

SyxPak wrote:

Thing is, alot of consumers (and probably alot of Small-to-Medium Businesses will implement WPA-PSK instead of full-on WPA, which isn't a whole lot better than WEP.

WPA-PSK is only vunreable if you use a short dictionalry key, as opposed to WEP where any key can be recovered.

I downloaded and burned the live CD they used, works well but you would need to get you head around all the tools and have compatible hardware to make any real use of it.

And what you mean by "full on WPA"?

scojones

Wpa2 > Wpa-anything

Rew

sjones wrote:

Wpa2 > Wpa-anything

WPA2 = WPA + AES with Hardware acceleration

The_Conductor

Rew wrote:

WPA2 = WPA + AES with Hardware acceleration

Still not compatible with mixed mode networks