An article on “The register” attracted my attention which says access to WPA protected WLANs will be granted after 60 seconds. In times where people understand WEP is the wrong way to protect their WLAN new methods are required. Clever guys from the Kobe university discovered this method.

Networking nerds claim to have devised a way of breaking Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption within 60 seconds.

The technique, developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, is based on the established Becks-Tews method, which involves making minor changes to packets encrypted with TKIP – Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, a WPA security mechamism – and then sending those packets back to the access point.

However, the Becks-Tews method is known to take anywhere between ten and 15 minutes to execute.

In a recently released paper, Ohigashi and Morii proposed a man-in-the-middle style of attack – also used by the Beck-Tews approach – in which a user’s communication is intercepted by an attacker.

This approach carries a high risk of detection, the pair admitted, so being able to shorten the attack time down to under one minute is a major advantage – to potential hackers, at least.

Ohigashi’s and Morii’s technique doesn’t work in WPA 2 – the AES-based successor to WPA.

The pair will formally unveil their technique at a conference in Hiroshima, Japan late next month.

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