Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By : Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs
Book Image

Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing - Third Edition

By: Vijay Kumar Velu, Robert Beggs

Overview of this book

This book takes you, as a tester or security practitioner, through the reconnaissance, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, and post-exploitation activities used by pentesters. To start with, you'll use a laboratory environment to validate tools and techniques, along with an application that supports a collaborative approach for pentesting. You'll then progress to passive reconnaissance with open source intelligence and active reconnaissance of the external and internal infrastructure. You'll also focus on how to select, use, customize, and interpret the results from different vulnerability scanners, followed by examining specific routes to the target, which include bypassing physical security and the exfiltration of data using a variety of techniques. You'll discover concepts such as social engineering, attacking wireless networks, web services, and embedded devices. Once you are confident with these topics, you'll learn the practical aspects of attacking user client systems by backdooring with fileless techniques, followed by focusing on the most vulnerable part of the network – directly attacking the end user. By the end of this book, you'll have explored approaches for carrying out advanced pentesting in tightly secured environments, understood pentesting and hacking techniques employed on embedded peripheral devices.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Attacking WPA and WPA2


Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) are wireless security protocols that were intended to address the security shortcomings of WEP. Because the WPA protocols dynamically generate a new key for each packet, they prevent the statistical analysis that caused WEP to fail. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable to some attack techniques as well.

WPA and WPA2 are frequently deployed with a pre-shared key (PSK) to secure communications between the access point and the wireless clients. The PSK should be a random passphrase of at least 13 characters in length; if not, it is possible to determine the PSK using a brute-force attack by comparing the PSK to a known dictionary. This is the most common attack.

Note

Note that if configured in the Enterprise mode, which provides authentication using a RADIUS authentication server, it might require more power machines to crack the key or perform different types of MiTM attacks.

Brute-force attacks

Unlike WEP, which...