WPA Encryption Broken In 15 Minutes By Researchers

Raising security concerns over the usage of wireless networks for transferring crucial data, a team of researchers have purported that they have developed a method to crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standards, which is widely used to safeguard data on these networks. 

The researcher duo, Eric Tews and Martin Beck, will unveil the method of cracking the WPA encryption in the upcoming PacSec Conference in Tokyo next week. 

According to Dragos Ruiu, a organiser of the PacSec Conference, the researchers have reportedly broken the Temporal Key Integration Protocol (TKIP) standard of WPA, in just around 15 minutes, enabling them to access the data sent from a router to a laptop, and also allowed them to send fake information to client’s computer linked with the router. 

However, the crack is dubbed as partial, as the process couldn’t be carried out reversibly, as they were not able to read the secured data sent by the PC to the router. 

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Security experts are already quite aware of the vulnerability of TKIP standards to dictionary attacks, but the speed at which the researchers have performed the crack in the WPA encryption standards has caused real worries about security of wireless networks in exporting confidential information for a variety of purposes.