Excellent post Michael, I just wanted to add to it. Michaelwagner Wrote: > 10. Published reports say WEP encryption is crackable. I don't know how > much power that needs, but what used to take a Cray can now be done on > a laptop. If you were a determined hacker, you could stuff the back of > a station wagon or a van with enough modern dual-processor boxes and > memory networked together and running off the car ignition networked to > a laptop with a wireless card and rival what took a roomfull of > supercomputers ten years ago. It's unlikely that someone would muster > that much power to break into your network or mine, because we (well, I > anyways) am not that high profile, so anonymity is our biggest asset. > But that's not to say it can't happen.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/aircrack/ can crack WEP in as little as 2 seconds. Doesn't require anything more sophisticated than a laptop. WEP was always a workaround cludge, it was never intended for long-term use but as a stopgap until something more sophisticated came along - WPA. > > 11. WPA is less crackable, but I don't know if it's been proven > theoretically that it can't be cracked. The encryption cannot be cracked by brute-force, it's far too strong for that. You'd need a bank of Sun workstations crunching at it around the clock for months. Instead, the standard attack is a "dictionary attack", which searches through all the words in a dictionary for passwords. So don't use a word you'd find in a dictionary. Use a long phrase made up of several words. Misspell. Capitalize in strange places. Use numbers and punctuation. Bottom line: use WPA where you can. TKIP encryption is very strong and can't be broken by brute force yet. WPA2-AES is even stronger than TKIP and should remain unbreakable for a considerable time even after WPA-TKIP is compromised, if that ever happens. Here's a link to NetStumbler, which is free: http://www.netstumbler.com/downloads/ and a link to Ethereal, a packet sniffer, also free: http://www.ethereal.com/download.html -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23134 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
