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Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by semi-extrinsic on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @11:20AM (#17707393)
No. They use Hashcat to generate a large table of keys based on a dictionary + permutations. So "L4vend3rB1ue" is likely crackable in few days, whereas "kGsunI68$@4g" is not.

Also, they say "with a reasonably priced GPU cracking infrastructure, many systems can be cracked within a few days."

I take this to mean they're using something of the order of magnitude of a couple K80 instances on Google Cloud, which will cost $25 per day. By no means prohibitive if you want to try and crack one specific WiFi, but too expensive for wardriving etc.

Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by tzs on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @12:51PM (#17708297)
This reminds me of something I've wondered about with brute force cracking.

Suppose Alice uses a 14 character password, each character chosen at random from the range [U+0021, U+007E] (e.g., the 94 printable ASCII characters above space). There are 4.21x10^27 or 2^91.8 possible passwords for Alice.

Bob, on the other hand, uses a 20 character password, also chosen at random, but Bob used a much smaller character set. He just used the 10 ASCII digits. There are 1x10^20 or 2^66.4 possible passwords for Bob. (Bob would need 28 digits for his password space to be as large as Alice's).

Bob's passwords come from a much smaller set, and so could be brute forced much faster--if the attacker knew that they only had to search that much smaller set. In most cases, though, the attacker will not know that.

But, a lot of people do use reduced character sets, so I'd expect brute force attackers to give some preference for searching those first--but how much? Would they be likely to find Bob's 20 character all numeric password ahead of Alice's 14 character all-94 password?

Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by Dylan16807 on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @02:12PM (#17709055)
> But, a lot of people do use reduced character sets, so I'd expect brute force attackers to give some preference for searching those first--but how much?

The correct answer is that it barely matters.

So an Alice password is worth 27.6 digits and if you went in order of entropy you'd try them after you try 27 digit passwords.

Let's say you think it's overwhelmingly likely that a password is Alice-style, maybe 99% likely. This suggests that you devote 1% of your processing power to Bob style. Instead of trying Alice-style passwords after you try 27 digit passwords, you will try them after... 25 digit passwords

Because the difficulty increases exponentially, devoting just a smidge of processing power to each different kind means that your progress goes roughly in order of increasing entropy.

And Bob's password will be cracked first, since "digits" is a very reasonable category to devote some computation to.

Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by sigi45 on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @01:08PM (#17708441)
Probably. I would try it first with normal letters and than with everything else.

But you should look up how the default password generation algorithm is from the vendor / model you try to crack.

I make my wifipassword way longer by using my phonenumber

Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by chess19 on Thursday August 09, 2018 @01:15PM (#17726187)
For maximum safety you should assume your adversary knows which character set your password comes from. Frankly, there are few reasons not to assume this.
Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by GekkePrutser on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @12:31PM (#17708114)
You can't use rainbow tables for WPA because the SSID is included in the hash. So the same password will result in a different key for different networks.
Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by mangix on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @01:26PM (#17708609)
Ehhh. Hashcat has a mode (2501) that operates assuming the PMK is known.

Rainbow tables are fairly useless though.

Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by baybal2 on Tuesday August 07, 2018 @12:38PM (#17708183)
Yes, but it makes possible to generate them for most popular SSIDs
Re:Cracking WPA-2 Just Got a Whole Lot Easier by crtasm on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @07:40AM (#17714996)
So it follows there's some benefit to picking your own SSID? Nice, I wasn't aware of that.