WIRELESS NETWORK SECURITY, WEP VS. WPA

In this article I want to discuss which is the better option on securing your wireless network, WEP or WPA?

WEP and WPA is the most commonly used counter measure against unwanted or illegal access on any wireless network, Most of this setup can be found at home, small-scale and even medium-scale businesses.

Using WEP and WPA are the easiest way of securing your wireless network. But nowadays those two encryptions are both hackable, even a noob hacker can crack a WEP or even WPA encryptions.

Here is the most common method that the hacker will do to crack your WEP/WPA keys :

WEP :

1. The hacker will disable first, the monitor mode of his wireless card.
2. After that, he will spoof its mac address to prevent himself for being caught or to pretend as an associate on the target network.
3. The hacker will use the monitor mode again in order to listen to the target network.
4. After the monitor mode, he will collect as many IV’s as possible to increase the chance of cracking.
5. Now he will use the ARP that he collected and use it to crack the WEP key of the target network.
WPA

1. The same procedure are applied, But for a hacker to success in cracking the WPA pass phrase, He must have a good dictionary. (a dictionary is a file that contains a huge number of different possible passwords/pass phrase that can be used by the hacker).
2. If in chance that your WPA pass phrase exist in the hacker’s dictionary, the hacker will surely crack the WPA.

Many software have been released to the public that is capable of cracking any WEP or WPA encryptions like Aircrack , Airsnort, even Backtrack (compilations of different hacking tools) that makes it easier for a noob hacker to crack it. As I’ve mentioned earlier cracking WEP and WPA are possible, but in case of WPA, the hacker must have a huge number of different passwords/pass phrase on his dictionary. So in order to avoid that your WPA pass phrase to be cracked, Use a combination of words and numbers, avoid using simple words, make your pass phrase a little unique that only you can understand. If your pass phrase does not exist on the hacker’s dictionary, there’s no way he can crack your WPA (at least for the noob hackers). But it’s still possible for a REAL and determined hacker to crack your WPA.

Now that you’ve got some ideas on how the cracking works, I’m sure that you can secure more you’re wireless network.

REMINDER
: Please avoid using WEP encryptions even it is 64/128 bit.
: On my next article I will give a step by step methods in cracking a
WEP encrypted network.