16 ms·
New attack on WPA using PMKID
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoImpressive. Even brute-force attacks eventually get better.
- mey 8y agoIs this an attack on WPA generally, or just WPA and not WPA2. I don't know if WPA are discrete designs with a common name or an evolution of the same design ala SSL.
- aftbit 8y agoCan anyone provide a brief summary of the state of the art of WPA cracking? How many bits of entropy do I need in my wireless password these days to deal with cloud GPUs?
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago80-bit of entropy, generated from a 6-word diceware is sufficient for almost every application. The real issue in WPA is the lack of forward secrecy, without it, once the passphrase is known, all previously recorded traffic is revealed.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 8y agoThat is a very minor issue compared to the easy password hash, no encryption for open networks, deauth attack, etc.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bsamuels 8y agonobody is going to spend the atrociously high cost of cloud gpus to crack someones home wifi password in an un-targeted attack. your home wifi threat actor is your neighbors kid playing with aircrack. in a corporate environment, use wpa2-enterprise, then password entropy doesnt matter quite as much.
- stefan_ 8y agoI thought enterprise was even more fucked thanks to the horror that is MSCHAPv2 and that no one bothers to setup the PKI stuff to authenticate the APs.
- dfox 8y agoIn WPA-EAP the AP is not active part of the authentication flow (it only forwards the frames) and as such does not directly authenticate itself to the client (it happens indirectly by the fact that it can forward the frames). The configuration space of WPA-EAP is huge and most combinations are horribly insecure, but as long as you stick with one of the "tunnel everything through TLS" EAPs (EAP-TTLS or PEAP) the result is safe against passive attackers even when you don't verify server certificates (obviously you should verify the certificates, because the active attack is trivial and does not have to interact with your network).
- spockz 8y agoHow would one setup the certificates in a right way? I presume that needs MDM anyways to conveniently distribute the certificates?
- angry_octet 8y agoYou can do it without MDM, just distribute via an https webpage. Most universities do this, because it is 90% byod or guest access (you can only be enrolled in one MDM).
- 8y ago
- xoa 8y agoNot to get into WPA's many failures but purely in terms of auth: At this point WiFi and email auth alone I think is enough reason to learn at least very minimal free MDM for your devices and family devices. I think a fairly significant number of networks fall into the categories private personal (which mainly involve a limited number of specific users and devices), organization (which can handle better auth anyway), or public/guest (which should either be open/"open" or use a portal). In all those cases you can do away with ever needing to manually enter a password via supplying it via a profile, using RADIUS, or a portal, and in turn be free to just have any password itself match 2^256 bits. Even for edge cases I think better distribution strategies make more sense going forward then trying to figure out what an "easy" password can be (and how to rotate it) while still being secure. Just like password managers with websites, we're past the point where we should be using human memory or manual input in general at all.
- PascalW 8y agoCan anyone recommend an easy to use MDM for this kind of stuff, for small private use?
- xoa 8y agoSorry I missed this, though this would probably make for an interesting Ask HN question by itself in terms of what the current best practices are. But for shear simplicity I'd probably start by looking at 1st party solutions: Apple's Configurator 2 and Google's Android Device Manager. macOS was also updated to support mobileconfig files a while back, so you can make profiles to deploy there too. That is probably about as minimal as it gets: simple applications that generate a file which can be distributed over USB or via messages or email and such to set up a range of functions. Setting up a server and command line generation of your own files and such (some tools like the Algo VPN maker will make deployable profiles themselves for ease of use) can be fun, but for a handful of your own private devices with relatively static settings it can be overkill too. A profile may be plenty good enough, and can also just plain save a bit of time by making it easier to load up a bunch of email accounts for example. Also, for the Apple case specifically, they perhaps unsurprisingly expose a lot less functionality in the native mass market user aimed UI then their devices actually support. iOS devices have native support for S/MIME certs for example, but you need to a profile to add them. Anyway I'd suggest trying those first before digging into server setups or cloud offerings or the like.
- pandasun 8y agoThere are some statistics on top of this "cloud cracking service" page that might be of interest to you: https://gpuhash.me https://gpuhash.me Right now it appears they have an 30% success rate (if I'm reading it right).
- eboyjr 8y agoCall me paranoid, but my home setup requires a string of 64 hex digits. This is troublesome as some implementations (like the factory setup screen for (old?) versions of Android) cap the input "password" at 63 characters.
- xoa 8y agoIs there any particular reason for this? Even plain case sensitive alphanumeric matches 2^256 bits at around 43 characters. That's should be pretty compatible with even older devices I'd think? Could combine it with some usage of VLANs to segregate different classes of device too, might be extra helpful you have some really legacy stuff you can't do without but that could drag down your network overall.
- jwilk 8y ago> 2^256 bits ITYM 256 bits. :-)
- xoa 8y agoHah, yeah that written in a rush and went a bit Department of Redundancy Department. Not gonna edit my silliness though, the point was there and I was honestly curious if there was some device out there for which it made a difference. The history is WiFi is so convoluted and implementations so all over the place I'm not sure any level of device weirdness would surprise me at this point, but it could still just be interesting to see exactly how off the rails something could go :)
- simias 8y agoSeems like an odd choice, why not use a shorter pass with a denser code? I use a rather long (23 character) alphabetic password myself, seems sufficient for my rather uncritical home network.
- glenneroo 8y agoSo why not shorten your password to 63? Will one character really make that much difference if someone is determined to crack your password? And why are you limited to hex digits? Why not use other symbols and characters as well?
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoSo, how secure is a network when the teenagers in the house give out the WiFi key to all their friends when they visit? How secure is it when said teenagers ask Dad to change the previous random-character password to a simple phrase to make it easier for their friends to type it in? Asking for a friend. :) In other words, about 99% of the WiFi passwords out there are vulnerable to a brute force attack. But we knew that already, didn't we? Was it not already possible to brute force WPA2 before this new attack? How much easier/faster is this new attack? It would have been nice if the article itself said something like: "This new attack increases brute force attack rate by a factor of 10x". Or whatever the right value is.
- rooam-dev 8y agoI started to encode it as QR code and share it with guests. It is cross platform :)
- copperx 8y agoAre there any devices with a built-in QR code reader? Android and iOS require a download. Not to mention Windows and Mac. Do you ask people to download a QR code reader on their devices so they can access your WiFi router? That's a bit too crazy, don't you think?
- lhabjane 8y agoLatest iOS supports QR codes through a standard camera app, no extra app needed
- pirocks 8y agoAfaik, the default camera app on most android installs can recognize/read qr codes.
- lucb1e 8y agoNever seen one that does this, but I only ever saw a Samsung (from 2012 and 2013), Lenovo (2016), Xiaomi (2018) and Huawei (2018) because my girlfriend and I don't swap them out every other year (heck, not even every four years). I feel like friends might have mentioned it as well, as the topic of a good, FOSS QR code scanner came up a few times in some chats.
- philjohn 8y agoInterestingly it seems limited to wifi networks that implement the roaming extensions to 802.11. When setting up my network at home with several AP's throughout the house I decided that, whilst roaming is nice, I don't trust most devices to select the strongest AP to latch onto after some trial and error, so disabled it wholesale.
- zrm 8y agoSometimes I wonder if trying to encrypt WiFi is even worth it. "E2EE or GTFO" is pretty compelling. The counterargument is keeping packet headers (i.e. remote IP addresses) and plaintext DNS queries private, but that's already the use case of a VPN. Even if it's just a "VPN" to your own home router. And then it protects you even against the operator of the access point (or someone impersonating it because, as usual, the passphrase is widely distributed).
- quickben 8y agoIt also depends on the bandwidth available. Average users don't overpay for unlimited.
- consto 8y agoEven if encryption isn't worth it, the access controls it gives you are to most access point owners. By limiting who can connect an owner can reduce bandwidth usage, improve latency, and increase the quality of their connection. Not to mention that most protocols in current use at minimum leak metadata. There would need to be a standard for an automatic authenticated VPN supported by hotspots and operating systems. Regular users shouldn't need to perform complex setup procedures. And at that point, while I do like the seperation on concerns provided, why not just fix or replace WPA?
- zrm 8y agoEven for that, it's not the ideal layer. A basic connection should generally be available for everyone even if it's a rate-limited logically-separated segment that only provides internet access. Then if you want special treatment for a specific subset of users they need something on top of that, but only that subset of users -- notably not the ones who come and go all the time -- and authenticating them has no real relation to the WiFi. A VPN to an endpoint on the same LAN works for this. There is also 802.1X, IPSec, etc., which common operating systems already support. Meanwhile the guest users should have their own external VPN to protect them from you, which they should only have to set up once for all networks.
- 8y ago
- stryngs101 8y agohttps://github.com/stryngs/scripts/tree/master/pmkid2hashcat https://github.com/stryngs/scripts/tree/master/pmkid2hashcat Enjoy =)