Last week, we reported that WPA WiFi security had been cracked. Glenn Fleishman, noted WiFi expert, writing at ars technica, analyzes this news and gets into the nitty gritty of the crack. He also relates the history of WiFi key cracking, and shows how this protection has evolved over the years. Yet he downplays this new information, pointing out that this is not a complete crack, and says that, “Someone can’t use this attack to break into a home or corporate network, nor decipher all the data that passes.” But he points out that “this exploit based on integrity and checksums should argue for a fast migration to AES-only WiFi networks for businesses who want to keep themselves secure.” (AES, or advanced encryption standard, is another form of encryption used to secure WiFi networks.) WPA is not broken yet, he says, but this discovery will lead hackers and security researchers to look more closely at it, trying to find other weaknesses.
