Plaintext Recovery Attacks Against WPA/TKIP

We conduct an analysis of the RC4 algorithm as it is used in the IEEE WPA/TKIP wireless standard. In that standard, RC4 keys are computed on a per-frame basis, with specific key bytes being set to known values that depend on 2 bytes of the WPA frame counter (called the TSC). We observe very large, TSC-dependent biases in the RC4 keystream when the algorithm is keyed according to the WPA specification. These biases permit us to mount an effective statistical, plaintext-recovering attack in the situation where the same plaintext is encrypted in many different frames (the so-called ``broadcast attack\u27\u27 setting). We assess the practical impact of these attacks on WPA/TKIP

Fast and Accurate Machine Learning-based Malware Detection via RC4 Ciphertext Analysis

Malware is dramatically increasing its viability while hiding its malicious intent and/or behavior by employing ciphers. So far, many efforts have been made to detect malware and prevent it from damaging users by monitoring network packets. However, conventional detection schemes analyzing network packets directly are hardly applicable to detect the advanced malware that encrypts the communication. Cryptoanalysis of each packet flowing over a network might be one feasible solution for the problem. However, the approach is computationally expensive and lacks accuracy, which is consequently not a practical solution. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose novel schemes that can accurately detect malware packets encrypted by RC4 without decryption in a timely manner. First, we discovered that a fixed encryption key generates unique statistical patterns on RC4 ciphertexts. Then, we detect malware packets of RC4 ciphertexts efficiently and accurately by utilizing the discovered statistical patterns of RC4 ciphertext given encryption key. Our proposed schemes directly analyze network packets without decrypting ciphertexts. Moreover, our analysis can be effectively executed with only a very small subset of the network packet. To the best of our knowledge, the unique signature has never been discussed in any previous research. Our intensive experimental results with both simulation data and actual malware show that our proposed schemes are extremely fast (23.06±1.52 milliseconds) and highly accurate (100%) on detecting a DarkComet malware with only a network packet of 36 bytes

Attacks Only Get Better:Password Recovery Attacks Against RC4 in TLS

Despite recent high-profile attacks on the RC4 algorithm in TLS, its usage is still running at about 30 % of all TLS traffic. This is attributable to the lack of practicality of the existing attacks, the desire to support legacy implementations, and resistance to change. We provide new attacks against RC4 in TLS that are focussed on recovering user passwords, still the pre-eminent means of user authentication on the Web today. Our attacks enhance the statistical techniques used in the existing attacks and exploit specific features of the password setting to produce attacks that are much closer to being practical. We report on extensive simulations that illustrate this. We also report on two “proof of concept ” implementations of the attacks for specific application layer protocols, namely BasicAuth and IMAP. Our work validates the truism that attacks only get better with time: we obtain good success rates in recovering user passwords with around 226 encryptions, whereas the previous generation of attacks required 234 encryptions to recover a

Solving Downgrade and DoS Attack Due to the Four Ways Handshake Vulnerabilities (WIFI)

The growing volume of attacks on the Internet has increased the demand for more robust systems and sophisticated tools for vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection, forensic investigations, and possible responses. Current hacker tools and technologies warrant reengineering to address cyber crime and homeland security. The being aware of the flaws on a network is necessary to secure the information infrastructure by gathering network topology, intelligence, internal/external vulnerability analysis, and penetration testing. This paper has as main objective to minimize damages and preventing the attackers from exploiting weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the 4 ways handshake (WIFI).We equally present a detail study on various attacks and some solutions to avoid or prevent such attacks in WLAN

Design And Hardware Implementation Of A Novel Scrambling Security Algorithm For Robust Wireless Local Area Networks

The IEEE802.11 standard for wireless networks includes a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which is a popular wireless secure communication stream cipher protocol approach to network security used to protect link-layer communications from eavesdropping and other attacks. It allows user to communicate with the user; sharing the public key over a network. It provides authentication and encrypted communications over unsecured channels. However, WEP protocol has an inherent security flaw. It is vulnerable to the various attacks, various experiments has proved that WEP fails to achieve its security goals. This thesis entails designing, evaluating and prototyping a wireless security infrastructure that can be used with the WEP protocol optionally, thus reducing the security vulnerabilities. We have studied the flaws of WEP and the reasons for their occurrence, and we provide the design and implementation of a novel scheme in Matlab and VHDL to improve the security of WEP in all aspects by a degree of 1000. The architecture was designed with a consideration for least increment in hardware, thus achieving power and cost efficiency. It also provides flexibility for optional implementation with the available technology by being able to be bypassed by the technology, which allows for non-replacement of existing hardware, common on both, the WEP and the proposed protocols, on the fly