Cracking of Wireless Networks - Penetration of A Wireless Network

Penetration of A Wireless Network

There are two basic types of vulnerabilities associated with WLANs: those caused by poor configuration and those caused by poor encryption.

Poor configuration causes many vulnerabilities. Wireless networks are often put into use with no or insufficient security settings. With no security settings – the default configuration – access is obtained simply by association. With insufficient security settings as cloaking and/or MAC address filtering, security is easily defeated.

Poor encryption causes the remaining vulnerabilities. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is defective and can be defeated in several ways. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Cisco's Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP) are vulnerable to dictionary attacks.