Researchers publish Wi-Fi crack

The Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard has been cracked, German researchers have claimed.

Erick Tews, from the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Martin Beck, from the Technical University of Dresden, published a paper on their findings on Saturday (November 8th).

They will be demonstrating their attack at the upcoming PacSec 2008 conference, taking place on November 12th to 13th in Tokyo, Japan.

Using the crack, the researchers were able to read and change information being transmitted between a wireless router and mobile device.

"Although this attack is not a complete key recovery attack, we suggest that vendors should implement countermeasures against this attack," the paper concluded.

"Because the problem can be fixed in a high-level part of the protocol, we think that updates can easily be developed and deployed with new drivers."

An analysis firm has warned businesses using WPA for their wireless LANs to update to WPA2.

Gartner advised that if this is not possible, companies should deploy wireless LAN intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) to monitor and counteract any attacks.