Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By : Vivek Ramachandran
Book Image

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide

By: Vivek Ramachandran

Overview of this book

Wireless has become ubiquitous in today’s world. The mobility and flexibility provided by it makes our lives more comfortable and productive. But this comes at a cost – Wireless technologies are inherently insecure and can be easily broken. BackTrack is a penetration testing and security auditing distribution that comes with a myriad of wireless networking tools used to simulate network attacks and detect security loopholes. Backtrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide will take you through the journey of becoming a Wireless hacker. You will learn various wireless testing methodologies taught using live examples, which you will implement throughout this book. The engaging practical sessions very gradually grow in complexity giving you enough time to ramp up before you get to advanced wireless attacks.This book will take you through the basic concepts in Wireless and creating a lab environment for your experiments to the business of different lab sessions in wireless security basics, slowly turn on the heat and move to more complicated scenarios, and finally end your journey by conducting bleeding edge wireless attacks in your lab.There are many interesting and new things that you will learn in this book – War Driving, WLAN packet sniffing, Network Scanning, Circumventing hidden SSIDs and MAC filters, bypassing Shared Authentication, Cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption, Access Point MAC spoofing, Rogue Devices, Evil Twins, Denial of Service attacks, Viral SSIDs, Honeypot and Hotspot attacks, Caffe Latte WEP Attack, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Evading Wireless Intrusion Prevention systems and a bunch of other cutting edge wireless attacks.If you were ever curious about what wireless security and hacking was all about, then this book will get you started by providing you with the knowledge and practical know-how to become a wireless hacker.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Speeding up WPA/WPA2 PSK cracking


We have already seen in the previous section that if we have the correct passphrase in our dictionary, cracking WPA-Personal will work everytime like a charm. So why we don't just create a large elaborate dictionary of millions of common passwords and phrases people use? This would help us a lot and most of the time, we would end up cracking the passphrase. It all sounds great, but we are missing one key component here—time taken. One of the more CPU and time-consuming calculations is that of the Pre-Shared Key using the PSK passphrase and the SSID through the PBKDF2. This function hashes the combination of both over 4,096 times before outputting the 256 bit Pre-Shared Key. The next step of cracking involves using this key along with parameters in the four-way handshake and verifying against the MIC in the handshake. This step is computationally inexpensive. Also, the parameters will vary in the handshake everytime and hence, this step cannot be pre-computed...