6 replies to this topic

[TcM]

Well I am connecting to various wi-fi points and I read online that they can sniff or see all data you are sending/receiving... so my question is how can i protect myself? any software that can encrypt or whatever the data i send and receive? so it will not be easily visible?

thanks.

[TkTech]

Not from anyone determined. Its fairly easy to break into any of the current popular authentication protocols. Its even easier to disable your laptop's wifi just by sniffing the mac address of the router and sending a raw command frame.

If you want security, don't use wifi.

This dudes a wifi god, I've read some of his papers just out of curiosity.

Papers

[TcM]

TkTech said:

Its even easier to disable your laptop's wifi just by sniffing the mac address of the router and sending a raw command frame

What is that? what do you mean?

[G_Morgan]

TkTech said:

Not from anyone determined. Its fairly easy to break into any of the current popular authentication protocols. Its even easier to disable your laptop's wifi just by sniffing the mac address of the router and sending a raw command frame.

If you want security, don't use wifi.

This dudes a wifi god, I've read some of his papers just out of curiosity.

Papers

There are no serious weaknesses in WPA right now. The only problem with it tends to be that people use weak keys. That's a weakness of the person rather than of the technology.

WEP is asking to be raped though. WEP is a 2 minute job to crack whatever password you choose.

If you want to be secure, the best you can do with Wifi is use WPA and use a long key and make sure it is entirely random (do not use a dictionary word anywhere, my key is pure line noise and I keep it on a USB key locked up securely at home. You only have to put it in once so it's not a problem).

Anyway, cracking WPA is NP-Hard assuming you do not use an idiotic key (there is a minor flaw in the protocol that exacerbates the situation with weak keys). Cracking WEP could almost be done by hand.

[TkTech]

WPA2, WPA was a 10-minute patch thats still based on WEP.

It doesn't matter what you send, what method you use. While they may not be able to connect and send commands or data to a router, they can still sniff your content with ease.

While wireless cards need to authenticate to send data to a router, 99.9% of all wireless cards will accept commands from ANY device it thinks has the same SSID as the router its connected to. This includes transfer packets(XFR) which you can use to get the client to disconnect and connect to you instead, and stealing their details. Or you can, with only two frames, mess up the card so bad you need to restart the computer to use it again.

[G_Morgan]

They both use RC4 but the length of the keys is rather different making brute force attacks much more difficult, also most of the problems with WEP are implementation details that leak information (in essence a large part of the weakness in WEP are side channel weaknesses, the related key attacks are impossible thanks to TKIP).

Of course WPA2 uses AES which is much stronger than RC4 and closes the one known WPA side channel. It is much better but WPA is more than good enough, there has been no proven method to cracking a WPA network with a well chosen key.

[TcM]

So you are saying that if I find an open wifi connection and i connect to it, i am vulnerable of other people to sniff the data i am sending/receiving? with no way of protecting myself?