WPA and WPA2 cracked 100 times faster
The days of relying on WPA or WPA2 as your online layer of wireless security may be numbered. A new technique that makes use of NVIDIA’s newer GPU’s to do some of hte processing means that it’s possible to break “forgotten” keys about 100 times faster than was previously possible. This means a key could be broken in days or weeks instead of years. The distributed password recovery software is available here. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about WEP and WPA/WPA2 that we ought to rethink.
I know some people may be thinking about moving back to the wired network instead (some may have not yet moved to wireless.)
I’ve made it common practice to use a vpn connection in to my openvpn server box (which is a dd-wrt linksys wrt54gl ). The reason I do this is because I typically make use of public wireless connections and some of them use wpa or wpa2. What’s interesting to me is that so many people think that just because you’re on a shared network with 20-30 other people and you’re all using the same WPA2 key then your data is secure. What most people don’t realize is that anyone else with the key will be able to access all your networked data. i.e. ANY unencrypted data passing over the wireless is going to be visible to ANYONE that has the key. So, do you trust the people over at the next table? the back corner? down the hall?
So… I would suggest that in using wireless you use a vpn encrypted connection “just in case”.