People breaking into my wireless network.....

Donut417 · February 11, 2016

2 hours ago, Trikein said:

What is your source for 100's of years? This paper shows AES-192bit in about 146 hours. With a decent GPU and the right software, it isn't impossible anymore, just improbable for the common black hat. No respectable cracker is going to waste a week just to get free wifi.

My source is my wireless lans class in college. The claim was at the time an average super computer would take 800 years to crack AES. I will admit that computers have gotten more powerful, but no average person has a super computer at their disposal.

vanished · February 11, 2016

Just now, Donut417 said:

My source is my wireless lans class in college. The claim was at the time an average super computer would take 800 years to crack AES. I will admit that computers have gotten more powerful, but no average person has a super computer at their disposal.

By the looks of the paper, it appears that there are certain techniques that can be used to massively reduce the necessary time by many orders of magnitude below what the obvious calculation would suggest. It could be these brute force "optimizations" that allow it to happen much faster.

Trikein · February 12, 2016

Kind of embarrassing to ask, but what about WPA Enterprise? Is that more or less secure then WPA2 AES? I know it uses a radius server which moves vulnerability off site, but doesn't that also open up for a man in the middle attack? I have never played with it, but always kind of wanted to. Is it worth it at all for the average consumer?

Oh, and while on the subject, could anyone explain the difference between WPA+AES and WPA2? Isn't WPA2 just WPA with AES encryption? Does WPA2 force AES or is it like email TLS which is backwards compatible with SSL but tries to connect with TLS first?

Razor512 · February 12, 2016

Keep in mind that each additional bit of encryption, doubles the strength. The AES in WPA2 AES, uses 14 rounds of 256bit length. It is still well beyond the means of being practical to crack. For more info on the style OF AES used for wifi, look up AES-CCMP

For WPA2 enterprise, the encryption strength is still the same, but it separate authentications for different users, thus there is no shared password. If a worker does something stupid and you kick them off of the network, you don't have to change a single password and rely on everyone not telling him or her the new password. instead each client has their own individual certificate. Also if one user has their key compromised, the info gained will not help in decrypting traffic captured from other wireless clients on the network. It is overall more secure when managing many users, but not quite as useful for a home user, even if it is able to generate different keys for the session, a PSK model works fine as long as your session does not last more than a few hundred years.

This is an older article, but it does a good job in conveying the the relation between key size and possible combinations (the idea that each bit doubles the strength).

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619