WPA Wi-Fi Cracked???

November 2008

Once thought safe, WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked. Security researchers say they have developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks. The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, a researcher will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption and read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router. To do this, the researcher and his co-researcher found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to the PacSec conference’s organizer. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack