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)

Protocol analysis with the network card


It is disturbing that we continue to see networks using the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) algorithm. We will get into the weaknesses of WEP and show how easy it is to obtain the WEP key for an attacker and also for you if you are working with your own network or have written the authorization to test someone else's network. There is absolutely no reason you or anyone else should be using WEP to protect a wireless network. Now that you know how to get your card to work, you can click on a network and connect to it if you like by clicking on the Connect button. An example of a connection to the WoodTigerLili network is shown in the following screenshot:

Once we are connected, we can treat this like any other wireless connection. You can verify that it is connected by entering the ifconfig wlan0 command in a terminal window:

root@bt:~# ifconfig wlan0

The output of a connected adapter is shown in the next screenshot:

As you may have noticed, this is just...