When the WPA standard was designed it was intended to offer a far greater level of security for wireless connections than the previous WEP standard.
However, security researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck now claim that they have developed a way to partially crack the WPA encryption standard in only 12 to 15 minutes.
Details will be discussed at the sixth annual PacSec conference in Tokyo this week, which reportedly involve a ‘mathematical breakthrough’ rather than a pure dictionary type of attack.
Erik Tews is himself no stranger to cracking Wi-Fi encryption as last year he broke the WEP encryption standard and then, ironically, suggested switching to WPA as the solution.
The new method described by the researchers only compromises data sent from a router to a laptop, not the other way around, but could well mark the downfall of WPA as a reliable Wi-Fi security measure.
The more recent WPA2 encryption scheme is not vulnerable to the attack, however, it is not widely available in the marketplace right now and home users are not likely to updrade quickly.
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