Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption for wireless connections
is considered a better and safer alternative than the older
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard that was cracked a long
time ago. Security professionals may have to rethink their
stance on WPA as researchers have developed a way to partially
crack the encryption used. By 'partially', the researchers said
they developed a way to intercept and read the data being sent
from the router to a laptop computer but they have not yet been
able to crack the encryption used to send the data from the
computer to the router. The researchers, Erik Tews and Martin
Beck, found a way to crack the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol
(TKIP) key fairly quickly without using a dictionary attack. By
tricking the router to send them a large amount of data, the
research team developed what they call a “mathematical
breakthrough” to crack the key in under 15 minutes. The newer
WPA2 standard is believed to be safe from this method of attack.