The Wi-Fi network can be cracked in a minute

Two researchers perfected a technique which allows to intercept some types of encrypted communications in minimal time. It is not yet the break of WPA, but it could be a good time to migrate to WPA2.

They are dangerous times for users of wireless networks. Only a few months ago, we got a program that can violate the cryptographic protocols using a brute-force attack: nothing particularly innovative, it was not that, using the muscles of the latest graphics processors, crack password-protected networks simple is now faster than ever.

To make matters worse comes a new type of attack. Presented in the study "A Practical Message Falsification Attack on WPA" (roughly "practical attack on WPA falsifying the message"), two Japanese university has perfected a method already known as Becks-Tews.

Oversimplifying, the technique is a man-in-the-middle attack: the attacker intercepts an encrypted communication between two network nodes, decoding the message, and then prepares appropriately before retransmitting the original recipient.

It is clear that in such a scenario, it is extremely important that the decoding time is as small as possible. Otherwise, you may have introduced a delay in communication that the intercepted suspicious.

The strategy Becks-Tews, with processing times ranging from 12 to 15 minutes, was particularly exposed to this point of view. Hence the two researchers have worked to reduce the number of calculations required, and claim to be able to crack and decrypt a message encrypted using WPA-TKIP in less than a minute.

However, it is noteworthy that, despite the improvements and the removal of certain limitations with respect to the original work, not even the new attack leads to the complete collapse of WPA. First, it is necessary that the two hosts are sufficiently far apart that they can not communicate directly without using the attacker as a "repeater". Even if the attack succeeded, however, the attacker will be able to detect only certain types of messages, without being able to go back to the same encryption key.

Nevertheless, the novelty should be a stimulus for all users and administrators to migrate their infrastructure to the most efficient WPA 2 which, thanks to the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) used, is, to date, completely immune to the new method of attack.

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