<story><title>Cracking WPA in 10 hours or less</title><url>http://www.devttys0.com/2011/12/cracking-wpa-in-10-hours-or-less/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesgt</author><text>There&apos;s a detailed description of the weakness in the WPS protocol here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/viehboeck_wps.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/viehboeck_wps.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It looks time there are two issues here. The first is that the pin is confirmed in two stages, each of which can be individually NAKed. That brings e complexity down from 10^7 to 11,000. It seems like this could be fixed by always ACKing the first stage and then ACKing/NAKing the second stage based on the result of both stages (unless doing so would somehow lead to leaking information about the PIN).&lt;p&gt;I think the first issue comes from an attempt at doing mutual authentication. Basically the device (like a wireless printer) wants to tell an access point (AP) that it knows the PIN. But, the device wants to make sure the AP also knows the pin. Otherwise, someone could spoof the AP and say  for any connection attempt &quot;yup, that&apos;s the PIN, now here&apos;s your (fake) configuration&quot;. I think they&apos;re also trying to cover the case where the HMAC they&apos;re using has a vulnerability, allowing a fake AP to discover the secret key by using nonces that expose a weakness in the HMAC.&lt;p&gt;Instead of just trusting HMACs to do their thing, they break the mutual authentication into stages. The AP and the device each prove they know the first half of the key. If either side fails that test, then the other side refuses to move on, supposedly protecting the second half of the key even if the HMAC is found to be broken. In reality of course, it leads to the attack described above. If both sides just always ACK the first stage, everything is fine as long as the HMAC is secure (which it most likely is). If you&apos;re worried about the HMAC being broken, you could use a dummy PIN for the second stage if the first stage fails.&lt;p&gt;The second issue is that most vendors don&apos;t implement lockouts after too many failed attempts. Even if they do, the issue above means a brute-force attack is still possible in a few months&apos; time because of the greatly reduced complexity. Fixing both issues would probably make a brute force attack impractical.&lt;p&gt;Until both issues are fixed, the best solution is to disable pin-based WPS. Unfortunately many low-cost wireless printers and similar devices require WPS to connect to a secured wireless network. Turning off WPS may make such devices unusable.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s possible that enabling MAC address filtering will also solve the issue(actually... not).</text></comment>
<story><title>Cracking WPA in 10 hours or less</title><url>http://www.devttys0.com/2011/12/cracking-wpa-in-10-hours-or-less/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yuhong</author><text>Add &quot;using WPS&quot; to the title please.</text></comment>