Router Password Question

FatPanda531

Honorable
Aug 17, 2013
9
0
10,510
I recently bought a new router for a home network and would like to put a password on it but I don't know what type to use? The types are: Shared, WPA-Personal, WPA2-Personal, WPA-Enterprise, WPA2-Enterprise, and 802.1x Anyone know?
 
Solution


AES is more common and more devices support it. But you can go either way, doubt you will find something that does not support either.
 


I don't think so. AES-128 has no known attacks which are doable in any sort of reasonable timeframe. TKIP is based on WEP which uses the RC4 encryption method, which is easily broken within a few minutes via traffic snooping.
 


GPU Acceleration makes than timeframe so much smaller.
 


Not in the slightest.

Even the most sophisticated attacks against the weakest AES methods have time complexities on the order of 2^50 and that requires a known starting vector. Attacks against higher levels of AES such as AES-256 which is increasingly supported have time complexities on the order of 2^100. Keep in mind that these are not brute force attacks, but attacks that are by definition faster and less stochastic than brute force attacks.

Brute force attacks against AES are rather improbable. AES is used because it has a rather low CPU and memory overhead for encrypting and decrypting data with a known key. However, a lot of work goes into expanding the key itself and this really slows down the brute force attacks.

Lets assume that 2000 integer operations are used in key expansion. This is probably rather low.

I actually have no idea how much arithmetic throughput a 7970 is capable of doing or if it can be optimized for floating point but lets pick 4 trillion operations as a ballpark figure as that's right around its single precision throughput.

4x10^12 / 2x10^3 = 2x10^9, or 2 billion keys per second.

AES-256 has 2^256 possible key combinations. This is 1.1x10^77.

Not every key needs to be tried, just until the key is obtained. If the key is completely random, then stochastically speaking it is expected that the key would be derived after half of the possible keys had been tried. This still leave 5.8x10^76 guesses as the expected number

At a rate of 2 billion keys per second, a single 7970 would be able to mine the key in 2.9x10^67 seconds. This works out to 9.4x10^59 years on average

GPU acceleration won't do shit to break AES
 


You are not accounting for complexity... Most people keep passwords very simple.
But I have no idea where you are getting half the numbers from.

But I see your point.
 


Which has absolutely nothing at all to do with the keying method. That's authorization. The keying method is stream security. Breaking the key would allow someone to listen in without even attempting to figure out the password. Even then, breaking a password would take forever as most access points will only respond to a handful of authorization requests per second. Try breaking a 64^8 or even a 26^8 password when you can only try one password every second.
 
Solution