WPA Wi-Fi encryption is cracked?

[MrLinus]

Why does this feel like deja vu? I thought this was already cracked or am I imagining it? Either way, it's starting to show how wireless -- by itself -- isn't a reliable secure protocol and no one should expect it to be that way (unless you have some good VPN stuff between you and what you're protecting.

Source: Network World

Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks.

The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.


To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference's organizer.


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