WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud

By Cory Doctorow at 5:21 am Tuesday, Jul 27

WPA Cracker is a WiFi security compromiser in the cloud, running on a high-performance cluster. Send them a dump of captured network traffic and $35, and they will try 136 million passwords in 40 minutes, tops (for $17, they'll run the same attack at half speed) -- the same crack would take five days on a "contemporary desktop PC." They also have an extended, 284 million word dictionary that you can run for $55 in 40 minutes. They'll also use the same process to crack the passwords on encrypted ZIP archives.

You're safe if your password isn't in any dictionary, including the special dictionaries used for password cracking (these dictionaries will try random words in combination, as well as common letter-number substitutions such as "1" for "i" and so on). The crack works on WPA and WPA2-locked networks.

Your best bet is a long, random string for a password -- 64 bits of random noise will probably foil something like this for a good time to come. But good luck reading the password aloud to your visiting friend when she needs to get her laptop online.

Questions about WPA Cracker (via Schneier)