defence in depth.

Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP) is often regarded as a secure 802.11 wireless authentication protocol. Whilst PEAP has the ability to become a secure protocol it is certainly not without its deficiencies. I thought I would take this opportunity to provide everyone with an overview of the PEAP protocol by examining what it is, how it works, where its shortcomings lie, and how to secure it. Before we dive into the security concerns surrounding PEAP it is important to know there are currently three versions of the PEAP standard. The version I will be referencing throughout the remainder of this post will be PEAPv0. This is the most common deployment of the PEAP standard. PEAP is a widely deployed Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) type used to securely authenticate users against 802.11 wireless networks. Developed by Microsoft, Cisco and RSA, PEAP has been made popular through its continued support by the Microsoft Windows platform. PEAP has the ability to su...

Recently I have noticed quite a bit of conjecture surrounding the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol and its use. With media hysteria now promoting WPA as no longer secure , wireless security has, unfortunately, become another great unknown to many people. In this three-part series I would like to delve into the WPA protocol and provide a background on its history, how it works and assess whether WPA is indeed insecure. By the end of this series I will have provided a foundation which will hopefully help answer two of the most common questions surrounding the wireless-security space: “Is WPA secure?” and “Should I be using WPA?”. To be comfortable in understanding the insecurities of the WPA protocol, Part 1 of this series will provide a brief background on 802.11 security. Designed as a basic security measure to secure 802.11 wireless networks, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was implemented to provide simple confidentiality to wireless networks. Soon after its inception, weakne...

Backtrack 4 has all the bells and whilstles we love and have come to expect from Backtrack in the past. That said however, as Bakctrack is currenly in a "Pre Realease" version, there are a couple of teething issues with various bits and pieces. One such issue is with Kismet Newcore. Kismet is our friendly little wireless stumbler that we all love. In Backtrack 4 pre release you may have noticed it is either missing functionality, or just plain doesn't work! Here is a quick guide for you to download an alternate version of Kismet Newcore and install it on Backtrack 4: 1. Make sure your network adapter is on # dhclient eth0 2. Change your director to /usr/src to download the Kismet Newcore source code # cd /usr/src 3. Download the Kismet source using the built-in subversioning software # svn co https://kismetwireless.net/code/svn/trunk kismet 4. Open the newly created kismet directory # cd kismet 5. Confrigure and make the source code # ./configure --prefix=/opt && ...