🛠️ WEP

Theory

This is a work-in-progress. It's indicated with the 🛠️ emoji in the page name or in the category name

WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was designed around 1999 to offer security to wireless network users. This standard requires the access points and the authenticating users to know a common secret key of 5 characters (40 bits) or 13 characters (104 bits). WEP is known to be very weak (IVs can be reused, IVs are too short (24 bits), secret keys are too weak, ...). Nota: when attacking 104 bits keys (13 chars), the only consequence is that the number of IVs needed for the cracking process is higher.

WEP can be configured with two different authentication modes : Open and SKA (Shared Key Authentication). As the name implies, SKA is more "secure" than Open. In practice, it can mitigate the part where the attacker needs to obtain an associated state. Once this step is taken care of, SKA is as easy as Open to break.

Requirements

Aircrack-ng is a complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security. The suite offers may famous tool like airbase-ng, aircrack-ng, airdecap-ng, airdecloak-ng, airdrop-ng, aireplay-ng, airmon-ng, airodump-ng, besside-ng, dcrack, easside-ng, packetforge-ng, tkiptun-ng, wesside-ng.

Depending on the wireless network configuration and on the context, there are different attack scenarios that can be followed but in order to carry on those attacks, there are requirements that need to be met.

Find target networks

First of all, testers can look out for access points using WEP with airodump-ng.

airodump --encrypt WEP $wlan_interface

Find connected clients

Another important thing to know is if clients are authenticated to the access point. Depending on the situation, different attacks can be carried out. In order to gather that information, testers can use airodump-ng to capture 802.11 frames between clients and the target AP. In the following example, frames were captured with two clients.

airodump-ng --channel $channel --bssid 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

Obtain an associated state

In order to inject frames from a client to an access point, the client has to be known by the AP (i.e. be associated).

When using aireplay-ng for various attacks (ARP replay, fragmentation, chopchop, ...), it is possible to set the -h option along with the MAC address of an authenticated client. The authenticated clients can be gathered with airodump-ng.

When no clients are connected to the AP, or when the tester doesn't want to spoof a legitimate client's MAC address to inject frames, it is required to operate a fake authentication attack in order to associate the client with the AP.

Attacks

Basically, the easiest attack paths come down to the following. "Client spoofing" means using a legitimate client's MAC address with aireplay-ng's -h option when operating packet injection attacks to the router (i.e. arpreplay, fragmentation, chopchop).

Scenarios	Open	SKA
Connected clients	sniffing + arpreplay (with client spoofing) + deauth + cracking	sniffing + arpreplay (with client spoofing) + deauth + cracking
No clients	sniffing + fake auth + fragmentation or chopchop + cracking	😰

Sniffing & cracking

When attacking WEP networks, testers "just" need to gather a sufficient amount (~20,000 to 60,000 depending on the key size) of IVs (Initialization Vectors) to operate a known-plaintext attack and find the secret key. This amount is indicated in the #Data column in airodump-ng's output. It is hence required to run airodump-ng in the background when operating any of the following attacks. In certain scenarios, it will print additional information (like SSID of hidden networks, authentication types for WEP SKA, ...) or capture useful data (keystreams, frames captures, ...).

airodump-ng --channel $channel --bssid 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' --write $output_file $wlan_interface

While airodump-ng is running, testers can launch aircrack-ng that will retry cracking the secret key every 5.000 IVs.

aircrack-ng $output_file.cap

FYI, for the WEP cracking process, the "PTW attack" (named after its creators Pyshkin, Tews, and Weinmann) will be used in the cracking process which is much more efficient that the standard bruteforce one.

Fake authentication

When no clients are connected to the AP, or when the tester doesn't want to spoof a legitimate client's MAC address to inject frames, it is required to operate a fake authentication attack in order to associate the client with the AP. This can be done with aireplay-ng. In the following example, the authentication mode was set to OPEN on the access point. For SKA access points, aireplay-ng will print "Switching to shared key authentication" instead of "Authentication successful".

aireplay-ng --fakeauth 0 -a 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

When the authentication mode in use is not OPEN, but rather SKA, the tester can either

• spoof a legitimate client's MAC address when attacking with aireplay-ng with option -h.
• wait for a legitimate client to connect to the AP (or force it), capture the authentication, have airodump-ng extract the keystream from it, and use it with a known-plaintext attack to bypass the SKA mode requirement (.i.e the need to know the secret key).

TODO : I've had issues with my AP, I need to try again with a RPi or something...

Depending on the scenario, it is advisable to operate fake authentication regularly to keep the association state alive during long attacks. This can be achieved by setting the fakeauth delay to something like 60 (--fakeauth 60) and/or changing the delay between keep-alive packets (-q option, set to 15 by default).

De-authentication

It is possible to send disassociation packets to clients connected to an access point. This works since 802.11 is a protocol where the source can be impersonated (spoofed access point MAC address), 802.11 is on the physical and data link layers of the OSI model. This will make the client try to re-authenticate to the target AP. In this attack, there is no need to spoof legitimate clients since the impersonated source is the access point itself and the destination is broadcast.

aireplay-ng --deauth 10 -a 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

This attack is more effective when targeting a specific connected client withe the -c option, and in order to work, the attacker needs to be close to that client since the frames will be sent from his machine to the client directly.

This attack can be used continuously to prevent the client(s) from accessing the access point by setting the delay to 0 (--deauth 0).

ARP replay

Tips and requirements

• An associated state is needed. Testers can either run a fake authentication attack or spoof a legitimate client's MAC address with the -h option on aireplay-ng.
• Connected clients are needed.

In order to make that operation more effective, it is possible to combine the ARP replay technique with a de-authentication attack.

The "ARP replay" mode of aireplay-ng can be used to gather new IVs by listening to ARP packets and resending them to the AP. The data will be captured by airodump-ng and saved in a capture file with the name supplied on the --write argument.

The classic ARP request replay attack is the most effective way to generate new initialization vectors (IVs), and works very reliably. The program listens for an ARP packet then retransmits it back to the access point. This, in turn, causes the access point to repeat the ARP packet with a new IV. The program retransmits the same ARP packet over and over. However, each ARP packet repeated by the access point has a new IVs. It is all these new IVs which allow you to determine the WEP key. (source)

aireplay-ng --arpreplay -b 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

Fragmentation

Tips and requirements

• An associated state is needed. Testers can either run a fake authentication attack or spoof a legitimate client's MAC address with the -h option on aireplay-ng.
• Connected clients are not needed in this attack (except if the testers wants one's MAC address to meet the associated state requirement).

This attack is really useful when no clients are connected to the target access point.

//TO EXPLAIN fragmentation attack : in certain scenarios, this process can be very long since it's virtually based on luck.

//TO EXPLAIN : deauth or disassociation packets can sometimes be received. In this case, it can indicate client MAC filtering. Testers should spoof a legitimate client.

aireplay-ng --fragment -F -b 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

//TO EXPLAIN packet creation

packetforge-ng --arp -a 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' -h 'CL:IE:NT:BS:SI:DD' -k 255.255.255.255 -l 255.255.255.255 -y $fragment_file -w crafted-packet

//TO EXPLAIN packet replay

aireplay-ng --interactive -F -r crafted-packet $wlan_interface

ChopChop

Tips and requirements

• An associated state is needed. Testers can either run a fake authentication attack or spoof a legitimate client's MAC address with the -h option on aireplay-ng.
• Connected clients are not needed in this attack (except if the testers wants one's MAC address to meet the associated state requirement).

This attack is really useful when no clients are connected to the target access point and when the fragmentation attack fails.

//TO EXPLAIN chopchop /!\ the -h option needs the attacker's MAC address (or spoofed legitimated client's)

aireplay-ng --chopchop -F -b 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' -h 'CL:IE:NT:BS:SI:DD' $wlan_interface

//TO EXPLAIN packet creation

packetforge-ng --arp -a 'TA:RG:ET:BS:SI:DD' -h 'CL:IE:NT:BS:SI:DD' -k 255.255.255.255 -l 255.255.255.255 -y $fragment_file -w crafted-packet

packet replay

aireplay-ng --interactive -F -r crafted-packet $wlan_interface

In previous tests, combining a fragmentation attack with a chopchop attack resulted in high a number of received IVs per second (#/s column in airodump-ng) around 250.

Resources

https://lesperance.io/

https://connect.ed-diamond.com/MISC/MISC-053/Cassage-de-WEP-hors-des-sentiers-battus