Dodgy salesmen in China are making money from long-known weaknesses in a Wi-Fi encryption standard, by selling network key-cracking kits for the average user.
Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China's bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year.
With one of the "network-scrounging cards," or "ceng wang ka" in Chinese, a user with little technical knowledge can easily steal passwords to get online via Wi-Fi networks owned by other people.
The kits are also cheap. A merchant in a Beijing bazaar sold one for 165 yuan ($24), a price that included setup help from a man at the other end of the sprawling, multistory building.
The main piece of the kits, an adapter with a six-inch antenna that plugs into a USB port, comes with a CD-ROM to install its driver and a separate live CD-ROM that boots up an operating system called BackTrack. In BackTrack, the user can run applications that try to obtain keys for two protocols used to secure Wi-Fi networks, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). After a successful attack by the applications, called Spoonwep and Spoonwpa, a user can restart Windows and use the revealed key to access its Wi-Fi network.
To crack a WEP key, the applications exploit weaknesses in the protocol that have been known for years. For WPA, they capture data being transmitted over the wireless network and target it with a brute-force attack to guess the key.
Security researchers said they did not know of similar kits sold anywhere besides China, even though tutorials on how to crack WEP have been online for years.
The kits appear to be illegal in China and it is unclear who is bundling the software with the USB adapters. One of the adapter makers is Wifly-City, a company that operates a Wi-Fi network covering coffee shops and other areas in Taipei, Taiwan. A woman surnamed Ren who answered the phone at the company said it does not supply the software that often appears with its products.
rest at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/050510-wi-fi-key-cracking-kits-sold-in.html
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