Book Image

BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security

By : Kevin Cardwell
Book Image

BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security

By: Kevin Cardwell

Overview of this book

Wireless networks are everywhere. You have probably set one up yourself, but have you ever wondered just how safe you are while browsing online? In the majority of cases, the default settings for your networks are not enough to protect you. With your data being transferred over the air, it can be easily plucked and used by anyone who knows how. Don't let it happen to you.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security will help you secure your wireless networks and keep your personal data safe. With this book, you will learn how to configure your hardware for optimum security, find network security holes, and fix them.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security looks at what tools hackers use and shows you how to defend yourself against them. Taking you from no prior knowledge all the way to a fully secure environment, this guide provides useful tips every step of the way. Learn how to select a wireless card to work with the Backtrack tools, run spectrum analysis scans using kismet, set up test networks, and perform attacks against wireless networks. Use the tools aircrack-ng and airodump-ng to crack the wireless encryption used on the network. You will learn everything you need to know to set up your wireless network for use within Backtrack and also how to defend yourself against the included attack tools.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we have discussed the measures you need to take to secure your wireless network. It is imperative that you select a data protection configuration to make your wireless network as secure as possible. The recommended setting is WPA2 with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). For those of you who want to go the extra mile and configure your wireless network to the level of an enterprise configuration, you might want to review the documentation at www.freeradius.org and experiment with building a RADIUS server to handle your authentication. It is not the easiest setup to deploy, but it does provide you with an enterprise-level wireless network. For home use, this is not required; the WPA2 AES is as strong as most will ever need. Bear in mind that you need to set a complex password with a minimum length of 14 characters. Refer to the following table for a small sample of how long it takes to crack a password depending on the password's length. For more information,...