Wireless Encryption

Have you ever wondered about wireless encryption before?

Find out more about it below.

Almost all of our networking devices these days are using Wireless Encryption or networks to communicate, and of course these communication is going through the airwaves. Every device on the wireless network is a radio receiver and a radio transmitter. If anyone is listening to these frequencies they can listen to all of the traffic going over this network. We will normally encrypt this data as it’s going over this wireless network to make sure it’s protected.

Everyone would get their own password to use, or there will be a shared password to use on that wireless network. Which means the people only with the correct credentials would be able to access the wireless network, and if someone does capture this wireless communication going through air, they would be unable to understand any of that encrypted data.

One of the most common ways of Wireless Encryption data on wireless networks is using WPA2, and if you have older equipment then you may also see WPA encryption used as well. There are several different protocols that are used to secure a network so let’s start with some of the popular protocols.

WEP(Wired Equivalent privacy)

It was developed in 1999, it’s the earliest secure protocol that was used in wireless network security. Also as its name implies it provides the same security as it does for wired networks. However this turns out not to be the case as after a time it was find out that the 40 bit Wireless Encryption key that WEP use was vulnerable and not secure.

Therefore it was easily hackable, so that’s why today WEP is no longer used and modern wireless networks won’t even have it as an option anymore.

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access)

It was develop in 2002 to solve WEP problems. WPA is far better than WEP and that is because it uses a stronger encryption method refer TKIP which stands for Temporal Key Integrity Protocol. It dynamically changes its keys as it’s use which ensures data integrity with a 128 bit encryption key. But even if WPA is more secure than WEP it is still outdate because TKIP did have some vulnerabilities.

WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access)

It was developed in 2004 but was ready in 2006 to provide even stronger security than WPA and it does as it uses an even stronger encryption method. It uses AES which stands for Advanced Wireless Encryption Standard which uses a symmetric encryption algorithm which makes it strong enough to resist a bruteforce attack. In Fact it is so secure that the U.S. government has adopted it and is now using it to encrypt sensitive data.

When you login to Wi-Fi router’s configuration page and you go into to Wi-Fi security section this is where you would find the different security protocols that you can choose from to protect Wi-Fi network. but recently a vulnerability was find in WPA2 which was refer as krack, this lead to developing a new protocol.

WPA3 (Wi-Fi Protected Access)

It was develop in 2018 to overcome some vulnerabilities over WPA2. It provided protection against dictionary attacks. So the problem with that was it was really easy to crack easy passwords by automated tools but WPA2 didn’t do anything about it. They never offered a new solution to this apart from suggesting that they use a strong password. WPA3 has taken into consideration and said that for every guest at a password the attacker has to deal with the network.

This is perform using a new authentication mechanism refer Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) which basically replaces the preshared key exchange used in WPA2. Traffic using each user and access point is encrypt and secure by introducing Individualizing data encryption.

Different attacks you can do on a Wireless Network

The most common and basic attack is a bruteforce attack which is perform with a huge wordlist and can be use in WPA2.
Evil Twin attack is an attack where the attacker creates a similar Wi-Fi network of the same name as the victim network he wants to attack which probably has a strong network so there is a high chance of victim connecting through which the victim logs in and the attack is successful.
Bluetooth has been mostly secure but there is an attack refer bluejacking which allows attackers to send unsolicit messages. But this didn’t expose any data and more of a spamming or annoying attack.
Krack attack is a vulnerability is WPA2 which is a MITM (Man In The Middle) attack which takes advantage of forcing the victim device to reinstall keys and let it install a all-zero key.

written by: Atharva Shirude

reviewed by: Sayan Chatterjee

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