Wireless Networks have become ubiquitous in today's world. Millions of people use it worldwide every day at their homes, offices and public hotspots to logon to the Internet and do both personal and professional work. Even though wireless makes life incredibly easy and gives us such great mobility, it comes with risks. In recent times, insecure wireless networks have been used to break into companies, banks and government organizations. The frequency of these attacks is only intensified, as network administrators are still clueless when it comes to securing wireless networks in a robust and fool proof way.
Kali Linux Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner's Guide is aimed at helping the reader understand the insecurities associated with wireless networks, and how to conduct penetration tests to find and plug them. This is an essential read for those who would like to conduct security audits on wireless networks and always wanted a step-by-step practical. As every wireless attack explained in this book is immediately followed by a practical demo, the learning is very complete.
We have chosen Kali Linux as the platform to test all the wireless attacks in this book. Backtrack, as most of you may already be aware, is the world's most popular penetration testing distribution. It contains hundreds of security and hacking tools, some of which we will use in this course of this book.
Chapter 1, Wireless Lab Setup: There are dozens of exercises we will be doing in this book. In order to be able to try them out, the reader will need to setup a wireless lab. This chapter focuses on how to create a wireless testing lab using off-the-shelf hardware and open source software. We will first look at hardware requirements, which include wireless cards, antennas, access points and other Wi-Fi enabled devices, then we will shift our focus to the software requirements which include the operating system, Wi-Fi drivers and security tools. Finally, we will create a test bed for our experiments and verify different wireless configurations on it.
Chapter 2, WLAN and its Inherent Insecurities: This chapter focuses on inherent design flaws in wireless networks, that make insecure out-of-the-box. We will begin with a quick recap of the 802.11 WLAN protocols using a network analyzer called Wireshark. This will give us a practical understanding about how these protocols work. Most importantly, we will see how client and access point communication works at the packer level by analyzing Management, Control and Data frames. We will then learn about packet injection and packer sniffing in wireless networks, and look at some tools which enable us to do the same.
Chapter 3, Bypassing WLAN Authentication: Now we get into how to break WLAN authentication mechanism! We will go step by step and explore how to subvert Open and Shared Key authentications. In the course of this, you will learn how to analyse wireless packets and figure out the authentication mechanism of the network. We will also look at how to break into networks with Hidden SSID and MAC Filtering enabled. These are two common mechanisms employed by network administrators to make wireless networks more stealthy and difficult to penetrate; however, these are extremely simple to bypass.
Chapter 4, WLAN Encryption Flaws: One of the most vulnerable parts of the WLAN protocol is the Encryption schemas – WEP, WPA and WPA2. Over the past decade hackers have found multiple flaws in these schemas and have written publically available software to break them and decrypt the data. Also, even though WPA/WPA2 is secure by design, misconfiguring those opens up security vulnerabilities, that can be easily exploited. In this chapter, we will understand the insecurities in each of these encryption schemas and do practical demos on how to break them.
Chapter 5, Attacks on the WLAN Infrastructure: We will now shift our focus to WLAN Infrastructure vulnerabilities. We will look at vulnerabilities created due to both configuration and design problem. We will do practical demos of attacks such as access point MAC spoofing, bit flipping and replay attacks, rogue access points, fuzzing and denial of services. This chapter will give the reader a solid understanding of how to do a penetration test of the WLAN infrastructure.
Chapter 6, Attacking the Client: This chapter might open your eyes if you always believed that wireless client security was something you did not have to worry about! Most people exclude the client from their list when they think about WLAN security. This chapter will prove beyond doubt why the client is just as important as the access point when penetration testing a WLAN network. We will look at how to compromise the security using client side attacks such as Miss-Association, Caffe Latte, disassociation, ad-hoc connections, fuzzing, honeypots and a host of others.
Chapter 7, Advanced WLAN Attacks: Now that we have already covered most of the basic attacks on both the infrastructure and the client, we will look at more advanced attacks in this chapter. These attacks typically involve using multiple basic attacks in conjunction to break security in more challenging scenarios. Some of the attacks which we will learn include wireless device fingerprinting, man-in-the-middle over wireless, evading wireless intrusion detection and prevention systems, rogue access points operating using custom protocol and a couple of others. This chapter presents the absolute bleeding edge in wireless attacks out in the real world.
Chapter 8, Attacking WPA-Enterprise and RADIUS: This chapter graduates the user to the next level by introducing him to advanced attacks on WPA-Enterprise and the RADIUS server setup. These attacks will come in handy when the reader has to penetration test large enterprise networks which rely on WPA-Enterprise and RADIUS authentication to provide them with security. This is probably as advanced as Wi-Fi attacks can get in the real world.
Chapter 9, WLAN Penetrating Testing Methodology: This is where all the learning from the previous chapters comes together, and we will look at how to do a wireless penetration test in a systematic and methodical way. We will learn about the various phases of penetration testing—Planning, Discovery, Attack and Reporting, and apply it to wireless penetration testing. We will also understand how to propose recommendations and best practices after a wireless penetration test.
Chapter 10, WPS and Probes: This chapter covers the two new attacks in the industry that have developed since the initial publication of this book—WPS brute-force and probe sniffing for monitoring.
To follow and recreate the practical exercises in this book you will need two laptops with built in Wi-Fi cards, a USB wireless Wi-Fi adapter, Kali Linux and some other hardware and software. We have detailed this in Chapter 1, Wireless Lab Setup.
As an alternate to the two laptops, you could also create a Virtual Machine housing Kali Linux and connect the card to it over the USB interface. This will help you get started with using this book much faster, but we would recommend a dedicated machine running Kali Linux for actual assessments in the field.
From a prerequisite perspective, readers should be aware of the basics of wireless networks. This includes having prior knowledge about the basics of the 802.11 protocol and client-access point communication. Though we will briefly touch upon some of this when we setup the lab, it is expected that the user is already aware of these concepts.
Though this book is a Beginner's series, it is meant for all levels of users, from amateurs right through to wireless security experts. There is something for everyone. The book starts with simple attacks but then moves on to explain the more complicated ones, and finally discusses bleeding edge attacks and research. As all attacks are explained using practical demonstrations, it is very easy for readers at all levels to quickly try the attack out by themselves. Please note that even though the book highlights the different attacks, which can be launched against a wireless network, the real purpose is to educate the user to become a wireless penetration tester. An adept penetration tester would understand all the attacks out there and would be able to demonstrate them with ease, if requested by his client.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Open a console terminal and type in iwconfig."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
airodump-ng –bssid 00:21:91:D2:8E:25 --channel 11 --write WEPCrackingDemo mon0
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Boot the laptop with this DVD and select the option Install from the Boot menu."
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