Researcher uses Amazon cloud to crack Wi-Fi passwords

[clifford_cooley]

Researcher uses Amazon cloud to crack Wi-Fi passwords

A security researcher from Germany named Thomas Roth has written a program that can crack the WPA encryption that protects many Wi-Fi networks in a few minutes. His software employs a "brute force" attack, where passwords are deciphered by successively varying combinations of numbers and digits, and since naturally that can take some serious computer resources he tapped on Amazon's EC2 cloud services to get the job done.

Initially it took him 20 minutes to crack the key for a network in his neighborhood, but after some modifications to his software he was able to bring the time down to only six minutes. Amazon rents its service to customers for 28 cents per minute so the total cost of the crack came to just $1.68.

Of course this is a violation of Amazon’s acceptable use policy, but Roth is hoping to show network administrators that WPA-PSK is not strong enough to keep out intruders and that they should be using stronger encryption algorithms – especially at a time when powerful and inexpensive cloud computing services are accessible to anyone. He plans to distribute his software publicly and give demonstrations on using it at the Black Hat conference in Washington D.C.

 

[Ian]

No doubt there'll be an iPhone app for this soon

This is a good reminder for people to use WPA2 (WPA2 TKIP+AES where possible) as that should take significantly longer for someone to crack - too long for a "drive by" attempt in most cases.

Some people still use WEP encryption which can almost be cracked in realtime .

 

[clifford_cooley]

I am still using WPA encryption, a few of my devices don't have WPA2 support.

I do have a WPA2 card and Access Point but yet forced to use WPA until all my devices are upgraded.

 

[catilley1092]

I'm using WPA2 protection myself, but I've read that some variants of Linux has the tools to crack most any network password. Whether this is true or not, I don't know.

But I hope that a bunch of tools aren't listed for the world to see.

Cat