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
