Chapter 4. Wireless Cracking

Information transmitted via wireless networks travels through the air. Anyone within radio frequency range of the transmitting AP is able to capture the wireless packets and potentially see sensitive data in transit. The options available to an administrator to obfuscate and encrypt network transmissions, and the implementation complexity of those options, vary based on the type of wireless network chosen. Primarily, you will encounter Open, WEP, WPA, and WPA2 networks during your penetration tests and we will discuss each of these in turn.

Open wireless networks do not require any authentication, nor do they provide encryption for the transmitted data, so the data passing through these networks can be easily captured and valuable information can be extracted. When accessing open networks, any device sending data should use either transport or application layer encryption to protect the transmission. Thankfully, open networks are not the only way to...