Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

There has been a lot of discussion and rumours of Virgin launching its 50Mbps ADSL product recently.

Virgin Media has started a viral campaign of the new product showing off the new cable modem/router they will be supplying.

While this may indicate the new service will be arriving any time soon Think Broadband previously announced that the roll out will take to April 2009 to complete and around 40% of us will have a choice of a 50Meg product by then.

Price wise it is said to cost £52 but this is unconfirmed and you will also have to sign up to a 12 month contract.

It will be interesting to see what the upload speeds are like. I find this speed becoming more and more important recently so a 50 meg down and 0.5 meg up would be a bit pointless.

It is also worth noting that cable does not suffer the same problems as ADSL when you move away from the exchange, however user congestion does play a part in the speeds.

Recently we reported that cracking WPA and WPA2 could be speeded up by 100 fold using two GeForce GTX280’s per workstation. However the practicality of this for your every day hacker is not very realistic.

Security researchers are now saying they have refined an existing WPA crack, making it more efficient that earlier reports.

Erik Tews will appear at PacSec security conference in Tokyo next week with a presentation named "Gone in 900 seconds: Some Crypto issues with WPA." where he will show off his findings in TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) cracking, that allow WPA to be broken in a brief 12-15 minute window.

Apparently once TKIP is initialised the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) can be obtained. Normally the hacker would then have to use a brute force dictionary attack, which is slow and crude.

Tews and his partner Martin Beck have discovered a "mathematical breakthrough" that allows the WPA encryption to be cracked dramatically faster. Some of the tools Tews and Beck used are rumoured to have been already included in Aircrack-ng WEP/WPA PSK cracking tool.

It is unlikely that this hacking technique will cause any issues in the near future, and certainly not a problem for average Joe and his home wireless router.

Over the past few years WEP encryption has been on the decline thanks to the serious security flaws associated with it allowing people to crack the encryption within minutes. This has led to more and more people using WPA and WPA2 to secure their wireless networks.

Russian security company Elcomsoft have posted a press release detailing a new method to cracking the increasingly popular WPA and WPA2 stating:

With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.

The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation, you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.

Granted this is never likely to be an issue for home users, though it could cause issues for a company using Wi-Fi.

It is worth noting that the main cause of concern would be a company using a static key. Also keys should not use English words but an alphanumeric string.

Via: securityandthe.net