Posted on 04/05/2005 11:34:01 AM PDT by atomic_dog
Millions of wireless access points are spread across the US and the world. About 70% percent of these access points are unprotected—wide open to access by anyone who happens to drive by. The other 30% are protected by WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and a small handful are protected by the new WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard.
At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirrordot.org ...
pwned by the fbi!
FYI...
Another one of the reasons I would never, ever use wireless LAN / internet access.
Running ethernet through a home or office can be a pain, but once it's up and running, you have a lot less to worry about.
I didn't realize the WEP could be so easily & quickly compromised.
Anyone dumb enough to not use better security deserves to have their system monitored or hacked. Just driving from the airport to my home, about 25 miles, I picked up hundreds of unprotected WLANs, all of which were on major thoroughfares. I could have stopped, tapped into their network, did all sorts of things, then drove on home and no one would have known. If you don't know what you are doing, DON'T DO IT!
Wireless Local Area Network
Maybe this explains the black van that's been parked across the street all week. Oh never mind, they're leaving now...
WEP in combination with MAC address limitations (only allow specific MAC addresses) and TURNING OFF THE BROADCAST OF THE SSID will help. Most people do none of these, and they automatically use the default channel 6, set at the factory. Really stupid stuff.
RE: how to secure data on HDD Vs FBI, CIA MI5
As for encryption, it's laughable how crappy pretty much all commercially-available encryption are. Even with the strongest encryption you can find, if they have access to the hard drive, and there's *any* pattern to the encryption scheme (which you need to be able to decrypt the data), then with enough patience they can decrypt it. Period. Depending on the strength of your encryption, it takes more or less time, but as long as you're using an off-the-shelf encryption algorithm, it can be brute forced. In Internet terms, 128-bit encryption is basically the standard. On really top-of-the-line "quantum" encryption, you're looking at 1-4 kilobit encryption. To have any chance of keeping people from decrypting your data before the statute of limitations runs out, you'd need terabit encryption, and even then, there's a chance that somebody brute-forcing the key will get lucky. Unless you have a PhD in cryptography, and are *really* motivated, you basically don't have a chance of encrypting your data such that it can't be decrypted. You can probably deter any recreational hackers, but if somebody knows what they're doing and has a reason to believe that you have something they want, you're an open book.
Now, since I feel like getting sidetracked, and I happen to enjoy cryptography, there is an encryption scheme that cannot be broken short of somebody intercepting the key. The problem is that this particular encryption scheme is incredibly bulky, and the moment you try to port it to a computer-based encryption/decryption, it's no longer unbreakable. I'm talking, of course, of a two-point encryption scheme, where you and I have identical books, each with hundreds of thousands of keys. On the order of 5 keys per page, 2,000 pages per volume, 10+ volumes. Each key different (how many permutations of 50 different characters are there?). In order to encrypt a message, I choose a page and a volume number, which gets sent with the message unencrypted. For each letter of the message (including spaces and punctuation), I use a different key, chosen sequentially. For you to decrypt the message, you *must* know which page to start on, otherwise, you cannot employ traditional cipher-breaking on it.
See, codebreaking, for substitution codes, relies on probability, and a little advance knowledge. In the English language, for example, the letter "E" is the most common, followed by "R", "T", and "S". In order to break a substitution code, I need a frequency table for each character in the encrypted message, and I need to make a few best-guesses based on the frequency of letters, until I get a short word or two that make sense. Other giveaways in English happen when you get a one-letter word. In English, there's exactly two one-letter words, so if your encrypted message has a one-letter word, you know that that character is either "A" or "I". Pretty much every language out there has similar patterns.
When each letter of an encrypted message is encoded using a different encryption key, such decryption method becomes useless, for obvious reasons. :) Incredibly bulky, but it's a way to guarantee that only two people can read the message. Of course, if a copy gets made of the decryption books, or if the books get stolen, you're still screwed.
Someone with a laptop and wi-fi, can really mess stuff up, when accessing from a crowded, public place like the airport. Virtually impossible to find the culprit.
You mean like broadcast a virus or worm, through an unprotected WLAN?
"Interesting that this is posted. Saturday I met with some acquaintances from Minnesota, one of which had a laptop. They were not staying at a motel, but needed to send and receive e-mails. They drove around until they saw a motel that had a sign advertising high speed internet and then parked in their parking lot. The person with the laptop was able to conduct all his business from the motel parking lot and went back several times in the next few days to get on the net."
A younger coworker in my office lives in the city. He and his wife enjoy high-speed wireless connectivity courtesy of their neighbor's unprotected WiFi modem/router. He has no plans to shell out the bucks for his own DSL/Cable Modem connection. He feels he's free-riding rather than steeling because it neither increases the cost nor decreases the service for his neighbor (I doubt the second point--if they're both downloading music or video at the same time they'll both likely have slower speeds).
Yep, someone could do a lot of cyber damage, from public-access wi-fi, and it would be extremely hard to trace it.
Ping
Just think if they were bad guys.
Hopefully, an airport wasn't stupid enough to let something like that on their system. I think a lot of this panic is nothing more than hype to sell newer hardware, newer encryption and newer software. I sell a product that actually traces rogue access points, finds unsecured networks, and actually capture traffic with the ID of the culprit. I have found very few really unsecured networks, except for the "Joe Homeowner" who doesn't know what he is doing.
They just looked under the keyboards for the WEP keys
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