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Aren't most wi-fi networks trivial to crack anyway?



Probably not, even for inexperienced users. WEP was flawed but it's been rolled out already and most ISPs configure routers with proper WPA-PSK and long passphrases.


That depends on the router and configuration. There's a flaw in WPS that makes it possible to quickly crack a router that has it enabled, even if it's using WPA/WPA2.


Wow. I was curious what flaw you were talking about... It seriously verifies the first 4 digits? That deserves a face palm.


Yeah, reporting the two halves separately is extremely bizarre. It's like they bent over backwards specifically to add a security flaw for no obvious reason. It's surprising that nobody noticed it before it was standardized and shipped.


http://www.neowin.net/news/the-wps-wifi-protected-setup-flaw...

(Quick search, seems a good explanation, if anyone else is curious.)


That's almost like in the movies, where the system always seems to verify each digit individually, thus making any code trivial to crack.


wondered this as well. I've heard numerous time that there are super simple programs out there that give you the password within minutes. No idea if there is any truth in it though.


For WEP this is true, for WPA/WPA2 without WPS it is much harder. WPA2 uses PBKDF2 with 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1, this is a rather slow algorithm.

On (http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/) you can find some values on how slow it is. The same computer can crack 7 billion md5 hash per seconds, but it can barely do 181 thousand WPA2 password per second.

At this speed you would need more than 200 days just to crack a 7 letter password only using a-zA-Z0-9. And more than 38 years to crack an 8 letter password. If your password is a word or derivation of a word, you can obviously get it much faster with a dictionary attack.


The WPS flaw has been patched in a bunch of routers however the program Reaver was able to exploit it rather quickly.




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