Goodbye to WPA-2 and Hello to WPA-3
Goodbye To The Terrible 4-Way Handshake and Hello to Simultaneous Authentication of Equals
4-ways to a disaster
Security in Wi-Fi has had a difficult route. In its current form (WPA-2) a password can be cracked by listening to the 4-way handshake between a client and the access point. This will then crack all the keys that have been used or will be used in the future. WPA-3 addresses this by securing the password, and uses zero-knowledge proof to make sure that no elements of the password are transmitted over the network. Both sides then pass their knowledge of the password, and then both can prove that each of them knows the secret password.
With WPA-2 we hash the SSID and the password and use this to create a master key (and which is used to derive session keys). The intruder can then use a dictionary or a brute force attack on the hash to discover the password and thus the long-term key (to which all other keys are derived). A PBKDF2 hash is used to make the hash difficult to crack, but if an intruder has GPU crackers, it can make the cracking fairly inexpensive. A weak password is also easily crackable, especially if it comes from a standard dictionary. This happens for an offline crack, and where an intruder can use Cloud-based crackers to crack the…
