Cracking WPA-PSK

Okay, so today i got my wireless card through, i know i normally do a post every Wednesday, but i decided to get a post up today due to the massive amount of readers I've had (about 1,000 in the last 2 days) and the wireless card arriving.

The Target

The target for this wireless security penetration test is my spare Netgear N600 router running DD-WRT firmware. The router operates over all the 802.11 standards up to N. (both 2.4GHz and 5GHz).

The tools

• Software
  • Aircrack-ng
  • OS : Backbox
• hardware
  • Thinkpad x201t (i7+8GB)
  • Atheros AR9271 Wireless Card
  • Client : HTC One XL

The test

First off, we need a monitor interface, luckily, airmon-ng (part of aircrack-ng) can virtualise a monitor interface from our managed wlan0 interface.

If you can't see, i ran the command

airmon-ng start wlan0

This provided us with our monitor interface mon0.

Next we need to check our wireless network is in range, so run

airodump-ng mon0

This should provided a screen similar to the one below.

Before we proceed, I'm just going to briefly explain the screen above. You should be able to see 2 dynamic tables (that being tables which the values are not stationary and keep altering). The top table is all the routers in range, this is our main table for now, the bottom table is of all the devices talking to routers and what routers that they are talking to. To keep it brief, the main 2 columns on the top table we are interested in are the BSSID, the ENC and CH. These are the MAC address of the router, the encryption and the channel.

Our next command is based on the last, but we are going to narrow down to the specific network we are testing to easily see what devices are connected. The command is formatted as the following

airodump-ng --bssid {bssid of the router} --channel {channel the router is operating on} {interface}

So for me it was

airodump-ng --bssid 20:4E:7F:A5:2A:DC --channel 1 mon0

This gave me a output like the following screen shot

Now we can see the device connected, the bottom table is now the important one, the BSSID is still the routers MAC address, but the STATION is now the clients MAC address. We should be getting a decent number in the packets field as well for this to work. It shows we have a decent connection to both devices.
Quickly before we continue, re run the airodump-ng command with the -w option before the interface, after -w put the name of the file you wish to save to.
Now we can really begin, remember in the post about WPA, we talked a lot about the handshake, well now we are going to grab it. The only problem we have is that the connection between client and AP is already made, so we need to disconnect them. Since we are working in our own environment we could do it manually, but my phone is the other side of the room and i'm a lazy person, so we will use another part of the aircrack-ng suite, aireplay-ng.
aireplay-ng requires only a couple of parameters for this operation, first off, -0 (this is the number not the letter). This tells the program we are going to be de-authenticating clients from routers, next a number of times to send the de-authentication packets. I choose 100 as i can stop it when i begin to get results, which i did. Next we need the MAC address of the access point using the -a then the MAC address, then the MAC Address using the -c and then the MAC address. Finally we need the interface. Just to clear it up here's a example

aireplay-ng -0 {number of times to try} -a {AP MAC address} -c {client MAC address} {interface}

Which for me became

aireplay-ng -0 100 -a 20:4E:7F:A5:2A:DC -c E8:99:C4:A1:8E:7E mon0

In the screen above, at the end of the top line, it says we have a handshake, this should be on your screen as well if you have succeeded.
Now to find the files we captured, just to ensure they are there.

Now to crack it, and get the password back, if you want to know how this process will work, refer to my prior post on WPA encryption algorithms.
To do this we will use the final part of the aircrack-ng suite for today. This is aircrack-ng itself. aircrack-ng is a massive cracking application which will pick out the correct EAPOL packets and find the MIC+ANounce+SNounce etc. this can work on both WPA and WEP. So we need to build a command for it, the basic formation of the command is

aircrack-ng -a 2 -w {wordlist file} {your .cap file}

Mine was:

aircrack-ng -a 2 -w /home/spectr3/Desktop/wordlists/rockyoualtered.txt blogcap.cap

This wordlist i inserted the password into on line 440. aircrack-ng took less than a second to get to the password, try it and find it as correct. giving me this screen:

As you can see the password was "Haxx4Lulz".

Hopefully this week you have enjoyed the session, if you want to message me, my email is martyncprice@gmail.com (there is also a paypal account linked to it if anyone wants to donate for some 802.11ac equipment so i can test if "beam forming" has any effect on cracking WPA networks).
Hope to see you all again on Wednesday.
-Spectr3

WPS

Hey all, i know im taking ages with this wireless card but it turns out i had it sent to my old residence the other side of Britain, so while i sort that out, i thought i would talk about WPS(Wi-Fi simple config or Wireless protected setup).

What is it?

A secure WPA/WPA2 password is a random sequence of numbers and letters, not a word (dictionary attacks can get them). This as you can imagine can be hard to remember, try remembering 3F4KJ5R7 for the next few days, you will forget by the end of the week unless you have a eidetic memory. To keep the story short, a bright spark came up with WPS.

For those of you who are un-aware what WPS is, its a feature in some routers where by to connect you can just type a 8 digit number into the computer that is on the router. There is a massive flaw in this as the router tells the user when you have the first 4 digits correct, essentially cutting the time to find the key substantially. Originally to break into a router, due to a optional lockdown, which not all routers implemented, it can take 6.3 years if you had to get all 8 digits, but with only having to get 2 groups of 4 digits, this time comes down to about a day (commonly more around 6-10 hours in practise). The lockdown basically tells the router to stop accepting WPS keys for 60 seconds after every 3 failed attempts.

How to break it

This is purely for the purposes of education, i personally believe in the freedom of educational knowledge, and if you know something you should share it, i do not encourage breaking into someone elses router, if you do, more fool you, its illegal and if you are caught you will be locked up, yes you can tell your friends you where "hacking" but this is not true hacking, there is no programming involved, no clever tricks, just logic.

Anyway, so now i have covered myself against stupid people doing illegal things and getting caught, we shall proceed to breaking it. I've already told you how it can be broken, but im going to go over it very quickly, but first a few tools, if you know them, please feel free to skip over.

Aircrack-ng suite

The aircrack-ng suite is a beautiful suite and a wireless "hackers" best friend, it has almost everything we need for this attack, i would advise getting it pre-installed in a distribution of linux. My personal recommendation is different from the norm, it used to be backtrack (now kali), but as BT5r3 was based on ubuntu 10.10 LTS it can be unstable if you play about too much, i personally recommend backbox. This distribution i find to be clean and enjoyable to use, its based off ubuntu 12.04 LTS (xbuntu to be exact due to xfce).

Reaver

The last tool is reaver. This is the main tool we will be using. To install just open terminal and type

apt-get install reaver

This will install reaver for you, if you get a error try

sudo apt-get install reaver

And type in your password (basically sudo gives you the ability to over rule lack of permissions, like "run as administrator" on windows.
Once we have both of these installed, we are ready.

Lets get attacking

All of the following happens in terminal, so put away your GUI, its CLI time :D
First of all we need to bring up a monitor mode interface, so run

iwconfig

You should be able to see your wireless card as wlan0.
Next type

airmon-ng start wlan0

This will bring your wireless card into a monitor mode (there are seven wireless modes, for more info check my first post about wireless) and this monitor mode should be a new interface called mon0, run iwconfig if you want to check it' there.
Now type in

airodump-ng mon0

This will start a program which will display all your wireless networks in range on the top area, in the bottom, it will show all the connections visible between client and access point.
When you can see your wireless network to attack, press ctrl+c to stop the program. Next you should have on your screen atleast one wireless network, this is the one you are going to attack, so copy the MAC address, it should look like XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (note. you cannot ctrl+c or ctrl+x in terminal, they are reserved for other things, so instead you must right click > copy).
hopefully you now have your MAC address to attack in your clipboard (the place your computers stores the copied text).
Final step, the actual attack using reaver.
Reaver requires 2 arguements, these are the interface (mon0) and the MAC address of the access point to attack, to execute, type the following, substituting where appropriate

reaver -i mon0 -b <MAC address here>

And thats the entire command finished, now just sit back and wait.

Hopefully this is enough for today, ill be back next week (hopefully ill have this wireless card issue resolved).
-Spectr3

Assembly Language starter

Hello to all, my wireless card still hasn't arrived, so i'm going to do a quick post on what i am currently working on.

Background

Although i do a lot of wireless, i still don't understand how it works, how one pulse of current travels from one device and ends up at the other, my eventual aim is to be able to create my own wireless communication device out of very basic parts using a arduino. As a result i have been looking into assembly programming, which is what i'm going to do some of today.

Take yourself back about 40 years, computers where at their births, for the first time there where teams of people striving to advance the technology within, but they still used machine code {0+1}, which is great to a computer because a computer only understands machine code, but what human can flawlessly and quickly? As a result, assembly language was born, now assembly language is the most basic of computer languages, there are no print commands and conditional statements like if statements and for loops.

Assembly language statements

Assembly language is key to every other language, it is the foundation stone, and it converts directly into machine code. By this i mean that every statement in assembly has a machine code equivalent that is run on the processor.
As a result it is the closest to machine code we have to understand today. All HLL (high level languages like C, C++, C#, Fortran, Pascal, VB, COBALT etc.) are converted into assembly by the compiler(this is not the only thing the compiler does, but it is all i am interested in in this post). But what are the statements?
Computers where created by mathematicians for solving complex maths in little time. A calculation which takes us about 5 minutes takes a computer nano-seconds. It is for this reason a lot of the commands are mathematics based.

• ADD : This merely adds one memory address to another
• MOV : This command moves the bits from one memory address to another
• CMP : This compares two memory addresses.
• JLE : This jumps if the address is less than or equal to.
• INC : This increments the memory locations content.

These are just a few basic commands, if you wish to, there is a book i highly recommend from Jon Erickson called "Hacking: Art of exploitation" which is worth its weight in gold just for the sections on assembly, providing a very in depth, interactive look at assembly language.

Hopefully this post has made a few people think about learning assembly language (or at least partially). If nothing else it will look brilliant on a CV for a computer based job.
-Spectr3

Wireless Card Broke

Wireless card broke!

Okay, so first of all, apologies to everyone, this post was supposed to go up last Wednesday, but a very close friend of mine was involved in a very serious traffic collision on his way home from my house. As a result, I've been preoccupied
I was going to do a post on using aircrack-ng to break into a home made wireless WPA network, but my card appears to have died (it belongs in the bottom of my laptop rucksack and as a result endures alot of punishment. As a result, i will be taking some time away and will post again once my new card comes through the post (approx. 1week3days.)
Again, apologies all, this weeks feels like i have let you down alot, but do not despair, the next post will include the capture files i use so you can follow along aswell :).
-Spectr3

Wireless Part 6

4-Way handshake

So this week i thought i would continue on with handshakes, and more importantly the most important handshake in wireless you would ever learn which is the 4-Way handshake. Now the 4-way handshake is merely the connection between the wireless client and the wireless AP, but its incredibly important when we get into WPA (which will be done in more detail than WEP as it is seen more, making it more important to understand, it also gives the basis of WPA-Enterprise).

There are 5 parts of the handshake, that's 5 important bit sequences

• ANounce
• Snounce
• MIC
• GTK
• Ack

These are absolutely key for our understanding, they are the main blocks of the handshake.
The handshake itself is just 4 EAPOL packets. The structure is as follows

1. AP sends client ANounce
2. Client uses this to construct the PTK (pairwise transient key), replying with a SNounce + MIC
3. AP uses this to construct a PTK, replying with GTK + MIC
4. Client replies with Ack
5. Connection Made!

So what happened?
The client attempts to connect with the access point, and has a pre-shared key to use to connect.
The client can now send the pre-shared key it has been told. To do this, the client applys PBKDF2 to create a 256-bit pre-shared key. PDKDF2, is a hashing algorithm, using 4 inputs, the pre-shared key, SSID (and SSID length), then 2 numbers, 4096 + 256. The 4096 is important as the passphrase is hashed 4096 times, making it completely one way, and 256 is the size of the output. The AP already has its own version.

But this key cannot be sent yet, so first of all, ANounce, all the ANounce is, is the authenticator (AP) Nounce (Nounce being a large random value). This is sent by the AP to the client. The client, or supplicant, can then create a SNounce, which is just a Supplicant Nounce. These are both used to create a PTK (pair-wise transient key). This is a dynamic key (making this handshake more secure as it is not guessable).

Now the PTK must be derived. It is just a function using the 256-bit pre-shared key from before, the ANounce, the SNounce, the Authenticator MAC and the Supplicant MAC. This is kept for later.

Next is message 2, this is just the SNounce and MIC, being sent to the AP. The MIC is the message integrity check, which is basically a checksum on the PTK.

At this stage, both the client and the AP both know the 256-bit pre-shared key, the SNounce, the ANounce, the Authenticator (AP) MAC address and the Supplicant (Client) MAC address. As a result, both can create the exact same PTK. As a result, when the authenticator creates its own MIC (based on the Authenticators PTK), the resulting MIC should be the same if the connection is legitimate. Thus, the pre-shared key should be the same.

If the connection is legitimate, the key installation is done, and finally, the key install is acknowledged with a ACK.

I don't think that until now i have properly explained, that was the connection in a WPA environment. Its nothing complex. I personally like to imagine it like 2 spies talking to eachother, checking if the other has the same information without saying what that information is (but i'm abit strange like that).

Anyway, I think that that is enough for this week, so i shall see you all next week for another installment.
-Spectr3

Wireless Part 5

Hey all, welcome back to part 5 of my wireless hacking set. Last week we looked at breaking WEP, so today i thought i would show how the handshake worked. Handshakes are key, they are the agreement and connection between the AP and the client. Without them there would be no connection at all.

Ethernet Frames

First important thing to understand is Ethernet frames. In a Ethernet packet (either wireless or wired), you have a number of sections.

• Preamble

  This is 7 bytes and is for bit synchronization.

• Start frame delimiter

  A single byte, used as a flag, and is the start of the frame

• Destination Address

  48-bits, this is the MAC address for the packet's end point, used by routers to determine exactly what device for the packet to end up at.

• Source address

  48-bits, this is the MAC address for the packets start point, so the end point knows who sent it. Also this is used so if the packet is corrupted or the endpoint is not found, a message can be sent to the sender so the sender isn't waiting for a reply forever.

• Length/Ethernet Type

  This gives the ethernet type (Ethernet or Ethernet II). In 802.3(Ethernet), this would give the length of the data section (maximum 1500 bytes).

• Data

  Exactly what it sounds like, this is the data being sent, up to 1500 bytes, in WEP which we talked about over the last few weeks, this would be the WEP packet we spoke of, so the IV + cypher text.

• Padding

  For reasons related to CSMA/CD (which i won't get into today), a packet must be at least 64 bytes in total. If the data field + other fields do not fulfill this requirement, the padding is used to make sure the packet meets it minimum required length.

• Checksum

  The Checksum, the saving grace of any packet of data, this is the answer to a simple one way algorithm run on the data to ensure when it reaches its end point it is still correct, and there are no 1's becoming 0's and vice versa.

Now as part of the start frame delimiter, there are some flags, these are just little extra bits that are sent in the frame, each is just a 1 or 0, indicating yes or no, just a couple of flags are SYN, ACK, RST and FIN, today we will focus on SYN and ACK.

The basic TCP handshake

For short, SYN is synchronize and ACK for acknowledge.

The 3-way TCP handshake is very simple, as as a result i am leaving it as the first handshake we will cover, and is the basis i used to learn the 4-Way Handshake. The basis of the hand shake is as follows
SYN
SYN,ACK
ACK

All this is is a ask, a reply and a acknowledgement that the reply has been received.

I'm going to leave this here for this week as i am extremely tired from doing my CBT earlier today (british compulsory bike training, so i can get a motorbike, which of course will have a Yagi antenna strapped to it for a bit of war driving :) ).
-Spectr3

Wireless Part 4

Okay, so last time we saw exactly how WEP was working, and hopefully you will have noticed where some of the vulnerabilities are. In this post we will be looking a bit at some of them and exactly where they are and how we can get past them.

IV's

So the first major vulnerability is the IV's. If anyone here has ever done some wireless WEP cracking in the past using a program to do it for you will have heard of IV's before, basically a program from your perspective gets a lot of these then does some calculation and spits back a password. This isn't the real case. As we saw IV's are the randomized initialization vector's put into the RC4 algorithm to generate the key stream to be XOR'ed to the plain text data. Then so the AP can view the data, the secret key + IV from the packet is run through RC4 by the router and the key stream and the data and checksum are worked out. This is the vulnerability you use when your capturing IV's. What vulnerability is there you might ask, well allow me to explain.

The only 2 things being kept secret in WEP is the data + secret key. Now the beauty of RC4 is every time you run that operation you will always get the same result. So if you separate the key stream from the data, you have the result of RC4. Now RC4 read in 2 items of information, the IV and the secret key and we have the IV. Using thousands of these calculation results we can begin to reverse the hash function, and thus we have our secret key, and this is exactly what is going on behind the scenes on a WEP cracking program, the key streams are being captured, then thousands of IV's are being used with their keystreams to reverse the RC4 algorithm to get the secret key, simple really.

This is the basic method used from 2001 onwards. Now i know this post was very short but as i am still unpacking from moving and trying to get a job i don't have a lot of time to spare at current, although you can still email me questions to martyncprice@gmail.com (yes my real name is Martyn Price, anybody who has decided to follow me on twitter should have found this out already @Spectr3Sec ), or you can ask in the comments section, until next week, hack well and prosper
-Spectr3