Wireless administrators recognized that having open networks or networks that rely on MAC address authentication, presented an unacceptable level of risk and therefore over time, there have been many attempts to harden the authentication to wireless networks, each with their own limitations:
- Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) uses the RC4 encryption algorithm and combines the user-defined key with a 24 bit initialization vector (IV). Unfortunately, IV's are reused thus allowing for us to use tools like aircrack-ng to get the original key, giving us access to the target network as an authenticated endpoint.
- Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) comes in several different flavors and is much more secure than WEP. Because it can be used in a manner similar to WEP where a pre-shared key is used (WPA-PSK), tools such as fluxion can recover the pre-shared key, and where...
