IT Dribble

While it may sound silly this is whats happening with vendors implementation of providing a ‘convenient’ end user solution for ‘security’. Imagine your local bank and the massive safe that lives within the walls of that building. Now think of the huge steel vault door that protects the banks (well actually, your) money – pretty safe huh? Wrong. If you look on the other side of the vault there is a wooden door leading into the vault protected by a bike lock. This is the current state of affairs of majority of wireless router vendors. Huge emphasis was put on making WPA / WPA2 Secure (and it is with a good pass-phrase) but then they go and screw the whole thing up by essentially putting in an easily cracked side door!

Yes I’m talking about Wifi Protected Setup or “WPS” and like all good things it’s brute-forceable but you can actually get real world results in a matter of hours instead of days/weeks/years with WPA configurations.

So if you need to test your router get over to http://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/ and download Reaver-Wps for your Linux box, put your wireless card into monitor mode and get cracking…literally!

Tags: cracking, ease of use - fail, linux, security, tools, wifi, wireless, wps