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

Shared Key Authentication


Shared Key Authentication uses a shared secret such as the WEP key to authenticate the client. The exact exchange of information is illustrated next (taken from http://www.netgear.com):

The wireless client sends an authentication request to the access point, which responds back with a challenge. The client now needs to encrypt this challenge with the shared key and send it back to the access point, which decrypts this to check if it can recover the original challenge text. If it succeeds, the client successfully authenticates, else it sends an authentication failed message.

The security problem here is that an attacker passively listening to this entire communication by sniffing the air has access to both the plain text challenge and the encrypted challenge. He can apply the XOR operation to retrieve the keystream. This keystream can be used to encrypt any future challenge sent by the access point without needing to know the actual key.

In this exercise, we will learn...