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By Root 452 0

I've learned several things while doing this research. First off, just because a technology is old or has been replaced by new tools and solutions doesn't mean that it isn't still viable or being used. More importantly, if the technology is of significant age, its compliance to best practices and security are probably sorely lacking. Like most readers of 2600 , I take privacy very seriously and I try to do all the right things to protect my identity and my credit. To think that my preventive measures can be thwarted by some jackasses sending my personal information over the airwaves for all to receive is very disturbing to me. This brings up the question of liability. Is a company or hospital liable for sending PII data over the air in an unencrypted manner? Are the telecommunications companies liable for not meeting minimal security practices on a protocol that is decades old? Regardless of the answers, the bottom line is that telecommunications cannot hide behind laws as their justification or safeguard against transmission interception. As long as telecommunications are being sent in an unencrypted manner, people will intercept them and use the information for nefarious purposes.

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Auditing the MiFi2200

by pnorton | 1183 words

The Internet has become much more than a series of tubes to many of its users, providing near-instant access to a variety of information as well as remote access to services. The technology has extended beyond the conventional wired realm into wireless communication as well.

While access is ubiquitous to some, one runs into circumstances, hopefully temporary, where one is unable to connect successfully to an access point.

All too often, one's efforts to connect are frustrated by access control or encryption technologies. Circumventing WEP or MAC filtering will be left as an exercise to the reader. WPA is acknowledged to have a respectable level of strength, by contrast, when implemented successfully. The novice hacking enthusiast will be grateful for a little help.

What are the weak points of the WPA implementation process? While perhaps technically and cryptographically sound, the weak link in the chain is the human implementing the security. The framers of WPA (and its successor WPA2) were relying on the implementor of the communication system not to write the password down and store it in a vulnerable location, to physically secure the access point, as well as to choose a cryptographically significant password. It is this last article which is perhaps the most vulnerable to attack.

A friend of mine who works in the infosec industry once speculated that something like 95 percent of humans, when choosing even an important password, will choose from a hypothetical list of perhaps one million passwords. This plays right into one of the weaker points of the WPA family of encryption process, which is the handshake. In the case of one system that I audited, human error made things even worse. For this reason, the reader's attention should be drawn to one popular access point, the MiFi2200 Mobile Hotspot, a portable 802.11b/g AP considered novel because it is a first generation IP over 3G. The 3G communication protocol will be familiar to most of our readers as the protocol that allows cellular telephone access to the Internet.

That's why I like the MiFi2200, because the geniuses at Virgin Media have made it possible for me to have roaming Internet access pretty much anywhere that I can get a phone signal. Cheap. Pay As You Go. I love Sir Richard Branson.

So if I could fault the good people at V. Media for anything, it's that one of the default security settings on the MiFi2200 is somewhat bad. The default setting for the WPA key does not take advantage of the full consortium-defined keyspace available to security implementors. It's an uncomplicated eleven-digit number. That means that there are less than one hundred trillion possible combinations. Does that seem like too many to try?

Perhaps we can narrow it down further. On the original unit that I purchased, the default encryption