Submission + - New attack breaks WPA WiFi crypto in 1 minute (threatpost.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: "First it was WEP, then TKIP and now WPA. A pair of Japanese researchers have developed a new technique for decrypting wireless packets encrypted with WPA , the most common wireless encryption protocol, in about a minute. The attack is an improvement on an existing technique and makes it simple for attackers to sniff and then crack supposedly secure wireless traffic. Threatpost.com reports: "The attack builds on the work done earlier by another pair of researchers who found a way to break the WPA encryption protocol that is used on many WiFi routers. Known as the Beck-Tews attack, the method involved making minor changes to packets encrypted with TKIP, a predecessor to WPA, and then sending the packets back to the access point. The vulnerability was in the way that the checksum was used. However, the attack required a significant amount of time to execute, as much as 15 minutes, making it somewhat impractical to execute in the real world. The newer attack, developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi and Masakatu Morii, improves on the Beck-Tews attack and lowers the amount of time needed to execute it to about one minute.""