Efficient High-Speed WPA2 Brute Force Attacks using Scalable Low-Cost FPGA Clustering

WPA2-Personal is widely used to protect Wi-Fi networks against illicit access. While attackers typically use GPUs to speed up the discovery of weak network passwords, attacking random passwords is considered to quickly become infeasible with increasing password length. Professional attackers may thus turn to commercial high-end FPGA-based cluster solutions to significantly increase the speed of those attacks. Well known manufacturers such as Elcomsoft have succeeded in creating world\u27s fastest commercial FPGA-based WPA2 password recovery system, but since they rely on high-performance FPGAs the costs of these systems are well beyond the reach of amateurs. In this paper, we present a highly optimized low-cost FPGA cluster-based WPA-2 Personal password recovery system that can not only achieve similar performance at a cost affordable by amateurs, but in comparison our implementation would also be more than $5$ times as fast on the original hardware. Since the currently fastest system is not only significantly slower but proprietary as well, we believe that we are the first to present the internals of a highly optimized and fully pipelined FPGA WPA2 password recovery system. In addition we evaluated our approach with respect to performance and power usage and compare it to GPU-based systems

Real-time encrypted speech communication over low bandwidth channels

Zsfassung in dt. SpracheElektronische Sprach-Telefonie und -Kommunikation sind heute weit verbreitet durch eine Vielzahl von unterschiedlichen Medien und Technologien, wobei der Trend nach wie vor in Richtung digitale Mobilkommunikation geht. Je nach Kommunikationsanforderungen kann ein Nutzer eine drahtgebundene Telefonleitung, eine Satelliten- oder Mobilfunk-Verbindung oder auch eine drahtlose Funkverbindung verwenden.Obwohl diese Systeme täglich von Milliarden von Nutzern genutzt werden, können die zugrunde liegenden Technologien Schwachstellen enthalten, die es potenziellen Angreifern erlauben, Gespräche abzuhören, sich als andere Nutzer auszugeben oder andere Angriffe durchzuführen. Besonders die steigende Zahl von drahtlosen Technologien erlaubt den einfacheren Zugriff auf die Kommunikationsmedien durch Angreifer und mindert zugleich auch die Wahrscheinlichkeit entdeckt zu werden. Um die Nutzer zu schützen, ist es besonders wichtig, dass diese Systeme ein robustes Design mit starker Kryptographie besitzen, sodass Informationssicherheits- Eigenschaften wie die Vertraulichkeit, Integrität oder Authenzität sichergestellt werden können. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit konnten wir zeigen, dass diese Sicherheits-Eigenschaften für einige der weltweit am meisten verbreiteten Kommunikationsnetze wie das Global Sys- tem for Mobile Communications (GSM) oder das Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) nicht oder nur zum Teil gelten.Während das Design von GSM einem sehr fragwürdigen "security-by-obscurity" Ansatz folgte und heute nahezu keine Sicherheit mehr bietet, leidet auch der offenere Nachfolger UMTS unter Sicherheitsmängeln. Wenn Nutzer über diese Medien sichere Gespräche führen wollen, können sie üblicherweise auf sichere Telefonieprodukte zurück greifen, die eine End-zu-End Verschlüsselung zwischen den jeweiligen Gesprächspartern ermöglichen. Da diese Produkte jedoch häufig auf geschlossenen Designs basieren, muss der Benutzer darauf vertrauen, dass die jeweilige Implementation auch sicher ist. Tatsächlich konnten wir zeigen, dass es fragwürdige Produkte auf dem Markt gibt, die kaum einen merklichen Sicherheitsgewinn erzielen. Dies führt zu Benutzern die sich in falscher Sicherheit wiegen und zwar glauben sicher zu sein, dies aber tatsächlich nicht sind. Desweiteren zielen kommerzielle Systeme oft lediglich auf ein einziges Kommunikation-Medium (wie etwa GSM) ab, sodass ein Benutzer für jedes einzelne Medium ein anderes Sprachverschlüsselungs-System benötigen würde. Um dieser Problematik entgegen zu wirken, entwickelten wir ein vielfältiges sowie eigenständiges System, dass zu einer Vielzahl von Medien verbunden werden kann. Einer der wesentlichen Vorteile sind die ultra-niedrigen Anforderungen an die Kanalbandbreite von 9600 Baud und weniger, wodurch auch der Nutzen über stark bandbreitenlimitierte Kanäle gewährleistet werden kann. Unser Design besteht ausschließlich aus standardisierten, bewährten und weitverbreiteten kryptographischen Prinzipien, womit ein hoher Sicherheitsstandard geboten wird. Das System ermöglicht sichere Gespräche nicht nur mit den Informationssicherheits- Eigenschaften Vertraulichkeit, Integrität oder Authenzität, sondern bietet ebenso Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), Leugbarkeit und limitierte glaubhafte Abstreitbarkeit.Today, electronic speech-telephony and -communication is broadly available through a number of different media and technologies, where the general tendency is still directed towards digital mobile communication. Depending on the communication requirements, a user may employ a wired land line, a satellite or cell phone link or even a wireless radio channel. However, even though billions of users use these systems every day, the technologies employed may have security vulnerabilities allowing potential attackers to eavesdrop on the conversation, impersonate users or mount other attacks. Especially the growing amount of wireless technologies makes access to the communication media easier for adversaries and less likely to get caught. Hence to protect their users, it is of utter importance that these communication systems have a robust design involving strong cryptography to ensure information security properties like confidentiality, integrity or authenticity. In the scope of this thesis, we show that these security properties do not or only partly hold for the world's most widely used communication networks such as the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) or the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). While the design of GSM strictly follows a questionable security-by-obscurity approach that offers almost no protection today, even the more openly designed successor UMTS suffers from security implications. If users need to a have private conversations over those media, they usually need to use secure phone products that offer end-to-end encryption between the involved parties.However, as these systems are often based on closed designs, the users have to trust these products to be secure. We show that there are bogus products on the market that bring no significant security improvements, resulting in users who merely think that their conversations are secure, although in reality they are not. Also, commercial systems often target only a single communication medium (such as GSM) so that for each medium a user needs to employ a different voice privacy system. To tackle these issues, we developed a new and versatile stand-alone system that has a number of advantages over existing secure telephony products. The working prototypes comprise of customly designed embedded hard- and software that can be connected to a broad range of communication media.One of the key features is the ultra low bandwidth requirement of 9600 baud and below, enabling its use over very low bandwidth channels. We based our design entirely on standardized, established and widely-used cryptographic primitives providing a high amount of security. In fact, our system does not only allow secure conversations with the information security properties confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, but it also provides Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), repudiation and a certain degree of plausible deniability.10

From old to new:Assessing cybersecurity risks for an evolving smart grid

Future smart grids will consist of legacy systems and new ICT components, which are used to support increased monitoring and control capabilities in the low- and medium-voltage grids. In this article, we present a cybersecurity risk assessment method, which involves two interrelated streams of analyses that can be used to determine the risks associated with an architectural concept of a smart grid that includes both legacy systems and novel ICT concepts. To ensure the validity of the recommendations that stem from the risk assessment with respect to national regulatory and deployment norms, the analysis is based on a consolidated national smart grid reference architecture. We have applied the method in a national smart grid security project that includes a number of key smart grid stakeholders, resulting in security recommendations that are based on a sound understanding of cybersecurity risks

Communications for AnyPLACE: A smart metering platform with management and control functionalities

Recent developments under the term Smart Grid change how users consume electricity and interact with the power grid. Smart metering and energy management are developments that transform the yet passive energy consumer to a participant that is actively involved in the energy market by using variable energy tariffs or by demand-response services. But such functionality demands a platform that integrates all smart devices in the users property, connects to external services and electricity providers, and has interfaces that provide information and control to the user. AnyPLACE will develop such platform. Based on the latest legislation in the European member states, it will incorporate smart meters and create links to external service providers. Furthermore, it connects the devices in the property of the end-user in order to be able to fully monitor and control the energy consumption. This paper presents the AnyPLACE idea and the problems that are solved on the communications aspect. It provides an in-depth analysis of current European legislation in the context of smart metering and provides the requirements that need to be realized by the platform. Additionally, it proposes a strategy to create a solution that can be used in any place of Europe. The paper also incorporates the security and privacy requirements in different domains and sketches a solution and architecture to fulfill these by incorporating existing open source implementations as provided by the openHAB project

Open and secure: Amending the security of the BSI smart metering infrastructure to smart home applications via the smart meter gateway

This paper describes an implementation to enable interaction between smart home solutions and Smart Meter Gateways (SMGWs). This is conducted in the example of the approach of the AnyPLACE project to interconnect openHAB with the HAN interface of the SMGW. Furthermore, security issues in the combination of those two realms are addressed, answered and tested so that in addition to the open character of the solution, it is still secure