Russian password recovery company Elcomsoft have released a new version of their Distributed Password Recovery software that claims a 100 fold increase in the speed for brute force cracking of Pre-Shared Keys used by WPA and WPA2.

 

Alas various sources are claiming this it the end of WPA/WPA2, well the attack is nothing new. Cracking of WPA/WPA2 PSK is old hat, something that has been known about for some time, there are various tools available such as Aircrack and coWPATTY. There are even tools that utilise Rainbow Tables to crack WPA/WPA2 PSK.

However, all of these require sometime considerable time to break the WPA/WPA2 PSK, especially if the key used cannot be recovered using a dictionary word based attack. The Elcomsoft software utilises the power of two Nvidia GTX280 graphics cards to achieve the 100 fold increase in speed for the cracking the WPA/WPA2 key.

This idea is not new either, Elcomsoft also use the Nvidia GPU to speed up LANMAN, NTLM and even Office Document password cracking within their Distributed Password Recovery software. Their software supports all GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 boards.

This does not spell the end of WPA/WPA2, if you use a strong password that has a good length say over 10 characters ideally over 14 characters, including Upper and Lower case characters along with Numbers and Symbols brute force is the only option and you should give anyone a good run for their money. Better still use WPA/WPA2 Enterprise, that is integrate your Wireless access with RADIUS or similar to use 802.1x authentication. Using this will render any attack using the brute force approach worthless.