Ah-OOO-GAH! Security Alert on Wi-Fi!
Well, we all knew "Wired Equivalent Privacy" was a rather baldfaced lie. But now 104-bit WEP can be cracked in just a minute or two's worth of capture time, and three seconds of subsequent processing.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/120.pdf
A quick scan does not clue me as to how the 3 seconds of processing time (that on a 1.7 GHz single-core laptop) would scale as one moves from a 104-bit to a 128-bit key. If it goes up by a factor of 2^24, that's not so bad, almost a year and a half of compute time. Assuming linear parallelization and an eight-core, 3.4 GHz machine, a little over a month. But that's a long string of assumptions.
Guess it's time to go buy that WPA-capable router. Sure hope that's what our university IT Wi-Fi is using...but I bet it's not.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/120.pdf
A quick scan does not clue me as to how the 3 seconds of processing time (that on a 1.7 GHz single-core laptop) would scale as one moves from a 104-bit to a 128-bit key. If it goes up by a factor of 2^24, that's not so bad, almost a year and a half of compute time. Assuming linear parallelization and an eight-core, 3.4 GHz machine, a little over a month. But that's a long string of assumptions.
Guess it's time to go buy that WPA-capable router. Sure hope that's what our university IT Wi-Fi is using...but I bet it's not.
posted by lupus @ 12:14 PM
1 Comments:
I have stopped using WEP for at least a year, since the first rumors of its upcoming breaking.
I simply use MAC address filtering and do not broadcast the SSID. This saves me the overhead of the (now useless) encryption/decryption process, keeps my neighbors away from my LAN but definitively does not keep a motivated intruder from it.
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