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