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You're reading from  BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2011
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781849515580
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Vivek Ramachandran
Vivek Ramachandran
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Vivek Ramachandran

Vivek Ramachandran has been working on Wi-Fi security since 2003. He discovered the Caffe Latte attack and also broke WEP Cloaking, a WEP protection schema, publicly in 2007 at DEF CON. In 2011, he was the first to demonstrate how malware could use Wi-Fi to create backdoors, worms, and even botnets. Earlier, Vivek was one of the programmers of the 802.1x protocol and Port Security in Cisco's 6500 Catalyst series of switches, and he was also one of the winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among a reported 65,000 participants. He is best known in the hacker community as the founder of SecurityTube.net, where he routinely posts videos on Wi-Fi security, assembly language, exploitation techniques, and so on. SecurityTube.net receives over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Vivek's work on wireless security has been quoted in BBC Online, InfoWorld, MacWorld, The Register, IT World Canada, and so on. This year, he will speak or train at a number of security conferences, including Blackhat, DEF CON, Hacktivity, 44con, HITB-ML, BruCON Derbycon, Hashdays, SecurityZone, and SecurityByte.
Read more about Vivek Ramachandran

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Time for action – cracking WPA-PSK weak passphrase


Follow the given instructions to get started:

  1. Let us first connect to our access point Wireless Lab and set the access point to use WPA-PSK. We will set the WPA-PSK passphrase to abcdefgh, so that it is vulnerable to a dictionary attack:

  2. We start airodump-ng with the command airodump-ng –bssid 00:21:91:D2:8E:25 –channel 11 –write WPACrackingDemo mon0, so that it starts capturing and storing all packets for our network:

  3. Now we can wait for a new client to connect to the access point, so that we can capture the four-way WPA handshake or we can send a broadcast de-authentication packet to force clients to reconnect. We do the latter to speed things up:

  4. As soon as we capture a WPA handshake, airodump-ng will indicate it on the top-right corner of the screen with a WPA Handshake: followed by the access point's BSSID:

  5. We can stop airodump-ng now. Let's open up the cap file in Wireshark and view the four-way handshake. Your Wireshark terminal should...

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BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide
Published in: Sep 2011Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781849515580

Author (1)

author image
Vivek Ramachandran

Vivek Ramachandran has been working on Wi-Fi security since 2003. He discovered the Caffe Latte attack and also broke WEP Cloaking, a WEP protection schema, publicly in 2007 at DEF CON. In 2011, he was the first to demonstrate how malware could use Wi-Fi to create backdoors, worms, and even botnets. Earlier, Vivek was one of the programmers of the 802.1x protocol and Port Security in Cisco's 6500 Catalyst series of switches, and he was also one of the winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among a reported 65,000 participants. He is best known in the hacker community as the founder of SecurityTube.net, where he routinely posts videos on Wi-Fi security, assembly language, exploitation techniques, and so on. SecurityTube.net receives over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Vivek's work on wireless security has been quoted in BBC Online, InfoWorld, MacWorld, The Register, IT World Canada, and so on. This year, he will speak or train at a number of security conferences, including Blackhat, DEF CON, Hacktivity, 44con, HITB-ML, BruCON Derbycon, Hashdays, SecurityZone, and SecurityByte.
Read more about Vivek Ramachandran