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)

Cracking WEP and WPA


There are a number of ways in which we can protect the data that is transmitted across wireless frequencies. When the IEEE committee formed and created the wireless 802.11 standard, they were conscious enough to know they had to take the security of wireless information into account, because wireless is in the air! Unfortunately, the committee was full of radio engineers, and as such, they really did not know about security. As a result, they made a fatal mistake when they selected the first encryption protocol to protect wireless networks. The flaws of that first protocol, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), are well documented. For more information and an analysis on this, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy.

In short, the selected protocol used an encryption algorithm named RC4. It uses a stream cipher, and as such, the key should not be reused. Even the author of the algorithm states this in the paper on the algorithm. Radio engineers should...