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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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Penetration Testing
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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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WPA/WPA2

WPA (or WPA v1 as it is referred to sometimes) primarily uses the TKIP encryption algorithm. TKIP was aimed at improving WEP, without requiring completely new hardware to run it. WPA2 in contrast mandatorily uses the AES-CCMP algorithm for encryption, which is much more powerful and robust than TKIP.

Both WPA and WPA2 allow for either EAP-based authentication, using Radius servers (Enterprise) or a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) (Personal)-based authentication schema.

WPA/WPA2 PSK is vulnerable to a dictionary attack. The inputs required for this attack are the four-way WPA handshake between client and access point, and a wordlist containing common passphrases. Then, using tools like Aircrack-ng, we can try to crack the WPA/WPA2 PSK passphrase.

An illustration of the four-way handshake is shown in the following screenshot:

The way WPA/WPA2 PSK works is that, it derives the per-sessions key called Pairwise Transient Key (PTK), using the Pre-Shared Key and five other parameters—SSID of Network...

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BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide
Published in: Sep 2011Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781849515580
© 2011 Packt Publishing Limited All Rights Reserved

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

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