Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud(theregister.co.uk) |
Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud(theregister.co.uk) |
I wish I could use that to get out of speeding tickets
"Officer I am just a researcher and trying to determine if the 55mph speed limit sign is really the law and if it's possible to break it"
Still, in the end I'd rather know about security problems even if it means the "bad guys" get told at the same time, otherwise you just have security theater.
Well, this was more generic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907513
Oh, it was over a year ago: http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/12/07/2322235/WPA-PSK-Cracki...
EC2 is an option, sure, but it's going to get expensive for commercial purposes. (I have issues with their costings... if it took 20 minutes, even using just one instance that would be.. $5.60, and other sources state he used many more than one :D EDIT: ah, sorry, he did use one instance and they are talking about his "6 minute" promise. Still, nothing you couldn't do on a decently fast "local" machine for cheaper)
We ran some trials with EC2 and the cost starts to mount for anything complex. A few of racks of meaty servers is, if you have a volume of work, is a cheaper investment.
Ultimately it looks like he is dealing with dictionary work - which is fine (and does work well). But will quickly fail with anyone competent (I going to hazard a rough guess of about 25% of the time based on my experience), which is where work with pre-computed tables and bruteforcing comes into play.
I'm not sure there is much substance to this story, sadly.
The fun thing is that you can now do it in the field. You could potentially grab the hashes with a netbook, then crouch in your hiding place behind the bins at Enemy HQ for six minutes while EC2 does the cracking, then go straight into the network, without having to risk sneaking out and back in again. Past the guards.
Dunno what espionage-based fantasy world I'm in today. I don't even play video games! However people really do this stuff. And now we can all have a go! Hooray! The kind of people who do these things dont generally have to worry about expenses though...
They probably took that $5.60 figure and tried to scale it for the amount of time he used.