I’ve been meaning to do a tutorial on cracking WPA wireless for quite a while, but I found this video that explains the methodology really simple. Let me say that cracking WPA is not like cracking WEP, in WEP you’re exploiting a vulnerability in the way the encryption algorithm is implemented, but in WPA the only vulnerability will be in the strength of the user passphrase. Yes you’ve guessed it, when cracking WPA basically what you’re doing is brute-forcing the user password, in other words the success of your attack will depend on your dictionary or password list. If the user’s passphrase is not in your dictionary, you will never crack the WPA key. There are several types of WPA dictionary list out there, but I highly recommend using rainbow-tables which can be several Gigs in size. How to find them?… Google is your friend! Read the rest of this entry »

In this tutorial I go over the process of cracking wep encryption for wireless network. Here I demonstrate why configuring your network with wep encryption is not such a good idea, as anyone with the right tools can crack it in a manner of minutes
Some history first:

There are two types of WLAN vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities due to poor configuration and vulnerabilities due to poor encryption. WEP was the original security standard used with wireless networks. Unfortunately, when wireless networks first started to gain popularity, researchers discovered that WEP was flawed, in which an attacker could defeat WEP because of flaws in the way WEP employed the underlying RC4 encryption algorithm.

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