New Flaws in Wireless Security Exposed
The Wi-Fi Protected Access or WPA is aone of the most popular forms of security used by wireless networks. Yet the potential risk and ease of breaching it might trigger some alarms for a lot of poeple especially if they were at PacSec 2008 confefence in Tokyo.
A week before the conference, the Register announced two German researchers, Martin Beck and Erik Tews, were going to expose a vulnerability exposing WPA protected networds to an attack that could compromise certain communications in less than 15 minutes. If anyone reding our blog attended the conference, we’d love to hear how it all went.
But this is far from being the first vunlerability to go public.
In 2001, three researchers found a way to reliably break the previous wireless security protocol, known as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), in less than two hours. By 2007, the latest refinement in attacks against WEP – found by Tews and two other researchers – reduced the time to recover a WEP key to less than a minute of calculations.
While those discovering how to tear security systems apart, those actually depending on them seem to be learning one thing: you’re never really safe! So if any extra security is at hand, apply it asap!
