Re: Access Point Security

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2011-04-23 at 23:51 +0200, Almo Nito wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
>  
> 
> Im wondering how i would identify that this access point has 128 bit
> wep enabled:

You can't tell the difference between 64-bit and 128-bit WEP at all
because that information simply isn't available with WEP.  You can only
tell that an AP requires "privacy" or not and that it does not use WPA.
For WEP the Privacy bit is the only thing you have.  You simply need to
know beforehand whether it's 64-bit or 128-bit (or 152-bit, but nobody
really uses that).

The only thing you can do is try hashing the key the user gave to 64-bit
first, try to associate with that using Shared-Key mode to get an quick
rejection, then hash to 128-bit and do the same until you can associate,
but there are 2 big drawbacks to that: (1) latency since there are a
total of 6 different ways to take a user key and hash it to the WEP key,
and (2) using Shared Key mode makes it trivially easy to determine the
WEP key due to security flaws in the Shared Key authentication that WEP
can use.

WEP is basically a lost cause. WPA fixes all that through the WPA IEs
that actually advertise the capabilities of the AP in the beacon.

Dan

>  
> 
> Flags: 1 
> 
> Frequency: 2437 
> 
> HwAddress: "00:01:E3:D0:xx:xx" 
> 
> MaxBitrate: 54000 
> 
> Mode: 2 
> 
> RsnFlags: 0 
> 
> SSID: "abc_123" 
> 
> Strength: 74 
> 
> WpaFlags: 0
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> On another access point having wpa I have something in wpa_flags, but
> how would Identify which security mechanism to use?
> 
>  
> 
> Kindest regards and thank you very much in advance!
> 
> 
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