On 7-Nov-08, at 3:01 PM, George Ou wrote: > First of all, this was not a crack against WPA; it was a weakening > of TKIP. > WPA != TKIP. WPA is an industry certification standard which > mandates TKIP > encryption capability but leaves AES encryption optional. However, > most WPA > devices do support AES. WPA2 mandates both TKIP and AES > capability. What > this means is that people should add TKIP to the list of obsolete > encryption > algorithms like WEP. > > The researches seem to have significantly weakened TKIP encryption, > so this > is different from the previous stories last month which was about a > brute > force dictionary attack on the Pre-Shared Key. TKIP was always > known to be > a stopgap measure in the encryption community and this research simply > proved that prediction right. WEP was deliberately weak so that > wireless > access points could be exportable in the late 90s when we had rules > against > exporting products with strong encryption, and TKIP was merely a > Band-Aid > for WEP. My worry is that people have the knee jerk reaction that all > encryption, including 3DES or AES, is equally unworthy when in > reality these > encryption standards are designed to hold up for many decades.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. Until you remove the default behaviour of most WPA/WPA2 implementations to downgrade automatically to TKIP from CCMP(AES) when asked to... a "weakening" of TKIP is a "weakening" of WPA/WPA2. cheers, --dr -- World Security Pros. Cutting Edge Training, Tools, and Techniques Tokyo, Japan November 12/13 2008 http://pacsec.jp Vancouver, Canada March 16-20 2009 http://cansecwest.com pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
