14 DAY TRIAL // Security researcher and cybercrime consultant Hitesh Choudhary has recently held an interesting webinar on wireless network security, which contains some valuable tips on how users can protect themselves and their assets against cyberattacks.
Choudhary has published numerous research papers, offers consulting services to the Indian police (free of charge), being a big fan of the “knowledge for free” concept.
As far as his research on Wi-Fi security is concerned, the expert has published a detailed technical analysis on his website, but we’ve asked him to sum it up for Softpedia readers.
“A Wireless Access Point always broadcasts some packets in the air to show its presence, these packets are known as beacon frames. I was trying to studying these packets in detail with the help of Wireshark. If you will do the same, you will notice that every frame was in clear text format,” Choudhary explained.
“In conclusion, one can say that if someone succeeds to copy all the packet fields, then he can easily broadcast these packets into the air from the same device that is used to access wireless network. An attacker can easily do a raw packet injection with this. In simple words: a fictitious network will be detected by the wireless clients.”
Part of his analysis focused on compromising systems via the auto-connect feature of wireless devices.
“Getting a probe packet (packet transmitted by wireless clients to search the network mentioned in Preferred network List), an intruder can broadcast a fictitious network of the same name,” he said.
“Since you are having auto-connected enabled, wireless client will get connected and one can access any data from your mobile or laptop.”
He highlights the fact that many network administrators rely on MAC level security to protect their infrastructures. However, according to the researcher, this isn’t as effective as many believe.
“MAC level security should not make you feel good and safe. Just by monitoring the air, we can find out how many MACs are associated with any network. Apart from this, changing the MAC of your system is not at all a new thing to any security researcher using Backtrack.”
Finally, he makes a comparison between the WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption methods utilized by commercial networking equipment.
“WEP is nowadays known as Worst Ever Privacy. No offence to this algorithm but WEP has been broken many time. This is so vulnerable that I didn't even try to demonstrate it in my webinar. WEP can be broken with 100% accuracy. So a thumbs down to WEP,” Choudhary said.
“WPA is said to be much better, but I'll go with WPA2, as it is more robust and secure. However, this can also be broken by capturing a handshake (that provides Snounce, Anounce and little more info), and provided that the key is weak.”
He recommends the users to set a 16-character long key to ensure that their networks are properly protected.
Video lectures made by Choudhary on Python, Java, Linux and a whole variety of other IT related topics are available at www.itube.igneustech.com.
Here is the complete webinar, entitled Wireless basics, security and breaches:
