WPA Wi-Fi Encryption Cracked

[engine]

WPA Wi-Fi Encryption [pcworld.com] Cracked

Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks.

The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.

[GaryK]

Thanks for the info.

I've been using WPA2 for awhile now, and according to the article it's not affected by this security flaw. All the businesses I'm familiar with use WPA2.

Also, wouldn't someone need to have some very valuable data to make it worth spending upwards of 15 minutes to crack TKIP?

And even then, if I'm reading the article correctly, they will still not have cracked the encryption keys between the PC and the router. A hacker could only see data going from the router to the PC but not the other way around.

[bill]

WPA2 is required for devices certified "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED." That does seem more secure than WPA, but it wasn't that long ago when WPA was being touted as the secure solution for Wi-Fi.

I guess we'll all need to be tunneling all our Wi-Fi traffic from now on? Time to bone up on SSH, eh?