Unifi Wifi Master Mac Never Showed

Remarkably, neither CloudCracker nor 12 hours of heavy-duty crunching by Hashcat were able to crack the passphrase.

After all, passwords are the keys that secure Web-based bank accounts, sensitive e-mail services, and virtually every other facet of our online life.

Lose control of the wrong password and it may only be a matter of time until the rest of our digital assets fall, too.

If theyre like the ones within range of my office, most of them are protected by the WiFi Protected Access or WiFi Protected Access 2 security protocols.

In theory, these protections prevent hackers and other unauthorized people from accessing wireless networks or even viewing traffic sent over them, but only when end users choose strong passwords.

I was curious how easy it would be to crack these passcodes using the advanced hardware menus and techniques that have become readily available over the past five years.

WPA and WPA2 use an extremely robust password-storage regimen that significantly slows the speed of automated cracking programs.

By using the PBKDF2 key derivation function along with 4,096 iterations of SHA1 cryptographic hashing algorithm, attacks that took minutes to run against the recent LinkedIn and eHarmony password dumps of June would require days or even weeks or months to complete against the WiFi encryption scheme.

WPA and WPA2 also use a networks SSID as salt, ensuring that hackers cant effectively use precomputed tables to crack the code.

The first step was capturing what is known as the four-way handshake, which is the cryptographic process a computer uses to validate itself to a wireless access point and vice versa.

This handshake takes place behind a cryptographic veil that cant be pierced.

But theres nothing stopping a hacker from capturing the packets that are transmitted during the process and then seeing if a given password will complete the transaction.

With less than two hours practice, I was able to do just that and crack the dummy passwords secretpassword and tobeornottobe I had chosen to protect my test networks.

This requirement may sound like a steep hurdle, since people often stay connected to some wireless networks around the clock.

Its easy to get around, however, by transmitting whats known as a deauth frame, which is a series of deauthorization packets an AP sends to client devices prior to it rebooting or shutting down.

Devices that encounter a deauth frame will promptly rejoin an affected network.

Indeed, using freely available programs like Aircrack-ng to send deauth frames and capture the handshake isnt difficult.

In less than 90 seconds I had possession of the handshakes for the two networks in a pcap (thats short for packet capture) file.

Unifi Wifi Master Mac Never Showed

My Mac never showed any sign it had lost connectivity with the access points.

Dan Goodin I then uploaded the pcap files to CloudCracker, a software-as-a-service website that charges 17 to check a WiFi password against about 604 million possible words.

Within seconds both secretpassword and tobeornottobe were cracked.

A special WPA mode built-in to the freely available oclHashcat Plus password cracker retrieved the passcodes with similar ease.

What I really wanted to know was how much luck Id have cracking a password that was actually being used to secure one of the networks in the vicinity of my office.

To his chagrin, it took CloudCracker just 89 minutes to crack the 10-character, all-numerical password he used, although because the passcode wasnt contained in the entry-level, 604 million-word list, I relied on a premium, 1.2 billion-word dictionary that costs 34 to use.

When I plugged it in, I discovered that he had left the eight-character WiFi password intact in the firmware.

How To Crack Unifi Wifi Master