Analysis of different methods for Wireless Network Penetration

Abstract

Network intrusion is defined as any illegal, unauthorized, unsanctioned or unwarranted activity on a computer network done with some malicious intent. There are three stages to network intrusion: Pre-connection Attack, Gaining Access and Post Connection Attack. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is an obsolete encryption method because of its relatively insecure mechanism but it is still used in some of the personal Wi-Fi networks present at homes. Packet Injection is critical for WEP cracking and it can be done in three ways- ARP request reply, Korek Chopchop and Fragmentation Attack. Our paper shows the comparison of the number of packets these methods are able to inject in WEP networks thereby studying their efficiency. A more secure counterpart of WEP, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), uses Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP is not a cipher in itself; rather, it ensures that a unique encryption key is linked to each and every data packet that is sent. This implies that the quantity of data packets that we tend to collect is rendered inapplicable, unlike in the case of WEP. WPA and WPA2 are very much alike and the only difference is that WPA2 uses an algorithm called Counter Mode Cipher Block Chaining Message (CCMP). We compare the speed of password detection on WPA2 using three methods: Conventional Wordlist method, Rainbow Table Method and Hash-Table Method on varying password complexity. In this paper, we discuss the various methods for pre-connection attacks and for gaining access to a wireless network by cracking its encryption.