An introduction to WPA/WPA2

The WPA/WPA2 are two different versions of a security protocol developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to substitute WEP as the security standard for 802.11 protocols. The WPA protocol was first published in 2003 and was in turn replaced by its successor WPA2 in 2004, as part of the IEEE 802.11i standard. Both WPA and WPA2 support two authentication modes: WPA-Personal and WPA-Enterprise. In the WPA-Personal mode, a preshared key (PSK) is used for authentication and there is no need for an authentication server. The PSK could be a passphrase of 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters. While, the WPA-Enterprise mode requires an authentication server that communicates with the access point (AP) with the RADIUS protocol and clients are authenticated using the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). We will see attacks against WPA-Enterprise in detail in Chapter 6, Attacking Access Points and the Infrastructure.

In this chapter, we will focus on attacking the WPA-Personal...