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New Weakness in 802.11 WEP
Posted by
michael
on Fri Jul 27, 2001 03:27 PM
from the candy-from-a-baby dept.
from the candy-from-a-baby dept.
tim finin writes: "WEP is the security protocol used in the widely deployed IEEE 802.11
wireless LAN's. "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4" by Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir describes new results on
RC4 with a practical attack against WEP -- an extremely powerful attack which can be applied even when WEP's RC4 stream cipher uses a 2048 bit secret key (its maximal size) and 128 bit IV modifiers (as proposed in WEP2). The attacker can be a completely passive eavesdropper (i.e., he does not have to inject packets, monitor responses, or use accomplices) and thus his existence is essentially undetectable. After scanning several hundred thousand packets, the attacker can completely recover the secret key and thus decrypt all the ciphertexts. The running time of the attack grows linearly instead of exponentially with the key size, and thus it is negligible even for 2048 bit keys." The brave can jump straight to the paper in pure, clean, postscript or PDF format.
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Hardware: TJX Breach Began With WEP Crack 164 comments
An anonymous reader sends us to the Wall Street Journal for a detailed report on what is known to date about the TJX data breach. It seems that the loss of over 45 million credit card numbers and more than 450,000 SSNs, driver's license numbers, and military identifications began with someone using a "telescope-shaped" antenna at a wireless link at a Marshall's near St. Paul, Minnesota in July 2005. The link was encrypted using WEP, which had been known to be broken since 2001. The crackers who got into the TJX central databases are believed to be Romanians or Russians with ties to the Russian mobs. The eventual cost of the TXJ fiasco could exceed $1 billion — not including the numerous lawsuits filed against the retailer.
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Re:Hardly a surprise (Score:1)
I have not personally used these since their release but here's ciscos [cisco.com] new access points that are suppose to support unique keys per client and other things, but the new crack would invalidate this improvement too.
Anyone have details or use this cisco stuff??
DMCA time (Score:2)
(Not that there's any chance of it. But still, it makes you think.)
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Re:Why hide this? (Score:1)
Why hide this? (Score:2)
This should be on the front page!! (Score:1)
Either way, when will we learn that any security measure will eventually be compromised, its only a matter of time. Using lousy encryption schemes as was the case here, will only mean that a hole in the security is found sooner rather than later.