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With the raw data captured, an attacker can use a tool like cowpatty or aircrack-ng along with a “dictionary file” that contains a list of many possible passwords. Image Credit: Mikm on Wikimedia Commons Cracking the WPA Handshake The deauth attack forcibly disconnects your device from its Wi-FI network, and your device immediately reconnects, performing the four-way handshake which the attacker can capture. However, they can also perform a “deauth” attack, which we covered when we looked at how your Wi-Fi network could be cracked.
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If an attacker waits long enough, they’ll be able to capture this four-way handshake data when a device connects.
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They’d then have the raw data they need to perform an offline attack, guessing possible passphrases and trying them against the four-way-handshake data until they find one that matches.
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This handshake is WPA2-PSK’s Achilles’ heel.Īn attacker can use a tool like airodump-ng to monitor traffic being transmitted over the air and capture this four-way handshake. Essentially, this is the negotiation where the Wi-Fi base station and a device set up their connection with each other, exchanging the passphrase and encryption information. When a device connects to a WPA-PSK Wi-Fi network, something known as the “four-way handshake” is performed. RELATED: How an Attacker Could Crack Your Wireless Network Security An attacker will have to guess a password and attempt to log into the WI-Fi network with it, so they certainly can’t guess millions of times per second. We tend to think of Wi-Fi as being only vulnerable to the online attack. (Apple’s iCloud wasn’t rate-limiting password guesses in this way, and that helped lead to the huge theft of nude celebrity photos.) Because they don’t have access to the raw data they can attempt to match passwords against, they’re limited dramatically. They could guess a few passwords and then Gmail would block them from trying any more passwords for a while. For example, imagine an attacker were trying to gain access to your Gmail account. They do this via “ brute-forcing” - literally attempting to guess many different possibilities and hoping one will match.Īn online attack is much more difficult and takes much, much longer. Clearly, with access to a password database offline, an attacker can attempt to crack a password much more easily.
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They can guess millions of times per second, and they’re only really limited by how fast their computing hardware is.
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For example, if an attacker managed to access and download a password database full of hashed passwords, they could then attempt to crack those passwords. In an offline attack, an attacker has a file with data they can attempt to crack. There are two types of ways to potentially crack a password, generally referred to as offline and online. RELATED: Brute-Force Attacks Explained: How All Encryption is Vulnerable
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