Practical Attack on Wi-Fi Protected Access Version 2 Authentication Protocol

Vincent N Omollo,Ruth K Chweya

doi:10.13189/ujcn.2015.030201

Abstract

Wireless networks provide convenient and low cost mechanism for connecting network devices. They are ideal since they do not require physical connections .They therefore help to overcome the port limitations of the physical hardware. Any device that has radio receiver can detect these wireless signals. This is because a wireless router transmits the signals uniformly in all directions. The ease with which connections can be established forms one of the weaknesses of wireless networks. They are therefore exposed to many attacks as these attacks can be launched from a remote location, unlike in wired networks where one needs physical connections to the network of interest. To overcome this challenge, authentication protocols have been developed to deter any illicit access to wireless networks. These protocols include Wired Equivalent Privacy(WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2 (WPA2) is the later version of WPA. The objective of this research paper was to demonstrate that WPA2 can still be broken, hence compromising on the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) of the data being transmitted in wireless networks. Data Confidentiality, Integrity and availability has been referred to as the CIA triad in this paper. The set up was implemented in Ubuntu 12.04 operating system using Ettercap, File2air, Khexedit , Wireshark and Airodump-ng from Aircrack-ng suite. The results indicated that WPA2 does not actually protect data in transit in wireless networks, and therefore there is need to explore other technologies that can secure wireless networks.

Highlights

The information being transmitted in the wireless networks need to be protected from unauthorized access
The need to protect data and information in wireless networks led to the development of access control protocols such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2 (WPA2) and IEEE 802.1X
Its main drawbacks are that it is costly to implement for the already deployed networks (Mohammad, 2005). This is due to the fact that it requires a new encryption scheme, known as Counter-Mode/CBC-Mac Protocol (CCMP) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Summary

Introduction

The information being transmitted in the wireless networks need to be protected from unauthorized access. Access Control mechanisms such as passwords, authentication, authorization, and firewalls have been used to deter illegal access to network resources. Integrity is concerned with protecting information from being modified by unauthorized parties This ensures that the information that clients or workstations are getting is the legitimate data. Availability is all about ensuring that authorized parties are able to access the information when needed (Terry, 2012) This means that the downtime should be as little as possible. The two most common encryption schemes for wireless networks include Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). When a network device connects to the WPA-secured network controller, an encrypted form of this password is transmitted. This paper sought to demonstrated that this version of WPA has security loop holes

Literature Review

Methodology

Results and Discussion

Conclusions and Recommendations