New security flaw discovered in WPA2 - most modern routers vulnerable

Posted on Thursday, August 09 2018 @ 11:18 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A security researcher who looked at the potential of the new WPA3 Wi-Fi standard inadvertently discovered a new vulnerability in the currently used WPA2 standard. Pretty much most modern routers are vulnerable to this atttack, which makes it easier to crack the password of your wireless network.

Previous attacks required the sniffing of a full authentication handshake from a user who logged into the wireless network, while the new method make it a lot easier to retrieve the Pairwise Master Key Identifier (PMKID) from a router using WPA/WPA2 security. Cracking the wireless password still takes a lot of time though, a typical length of 10 characters takes about eight days to crack on a system with four GPUs.
"Cracking PSKs is made easier by some manufacturers creating PSKs that follow an obvious pattern that can be mapped directly to the make of the routers. In addition, the AP mac address and the pattern of the ESSID allows an attacker to know the AP manufacturer without having physical access to it," Steube continued to tell us via email. "Attackers have collected the pattern used by the manufacturers and have created generators for each of them, which can then be fed into hashcat. Some manufacturers use pattern that are too large to search but others do not. The faster your hardware is, the faster you can search through such a keyspace. A typical manufacturers PSK of length 10 takes 8 days to crack (on a 4 GPU box)."
Full details at Bleeping Computer.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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