Archived from groups: alt.internet.wireless (
More info?)
On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 08:12:35 -0500, Lars M. Hansen
<badnews@hansenonline.net> wrote:
>On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:19:47 +0000, Simon Pleasants spoketh
[WEP]
>Assuming there's enough activity, about 1 hour.
Really? That seems VERY quick. All previous posts I had read
suggested that it would take days to crack a 128bit WEP key. By 1hr,
did you mean just cracking the key AFTER all the packets had been
captured because surely on a low usage network like the one described
it would at least take days to capture enough information to have a go
at the key?
I am not disputing your figures, just surprised.
[WPA-PSK]
>Since it would be essentially brute force cracking, that would mean that
>they'd have to try every possible combination. Now, there's 26 letters
>and 52 counting upper case, plus 10 numbers and let's say 18 special
>characters just to make it easy on me ... With 56 characters, that would
>be 60^56, which is 3.77e99 combinations. According to my sources, Lopht
>takes about 10 minutes to brute-force crack a four character password
>(26 characters, 4 letters = 26^4 = 456,976) on a 450MHz computer. Using
>that as a guideline, it would take 8.25e92 minutes to crack a 56
>character password. Even if you consider todays computers are 5-6 times
>faster, dividing the following numbers by 5 doesn't make the picture any
>prettier.
>
>That is 1.93e91 hours, or
>5.73e89 days, or
>1.57e87 years...
Okay, it's the end of the working week for me and most of that went
straight over my head, but it sounds like a long time anyway.
>>Add to that software firewalls on all LAN computers, access only to
>>files only by particular usernames yadda yadda yadda. My hacking
>>abilities are nil, so I find all of this stuff interesting.
>
>Software firewalls on all LAN computers may or may not factor in here at
>all, because they would normally be configured in such as manner that
>access is allowed for LAN computers to resources that are needed.
In my case, because I know what the IP addresses are of the other
computers the software firewall on the server only allows access from
the two IP addresses used by the client machines. The hacker would
need to work out which IP addresses are allowed access. I understand
this information could be determined from the very same packets
captured to crack the key - as would the information necessary to
bypass the MAC address restrictions but will extend the time necessary
to compromise the system - even if only by minutes.
Furthermore, correct me if I am wrong, but the software firewall would
prevent any information being transmitted back from that machine, so
trying to take it over to send information out to the internet would
not work.
>means, that if one computer shares files that other computers need, then
>a hacker who has gained access to your LAN will be considered just
>another LAN computer. However, there may be authentication involved, so
>just having your computer on a LAN doesn't automatically give you rights
>to read files on the network, so the hacker would also have another
>obstacle of getting a valid username and password to actually gain
>access to files...
That's exactly it. Since only two users are ever likely to need
access to the server's resources the shares are available only to
those two and even then with increasing restrictions on the more
"interesting" files.
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