Wireless Networks have become ubiquitous in today's world. Millions of people use them worldwide every day at their homes, offices, and public hotspots to log on to the Internet and do both personal and professional work. Even though wireless makes life incredibly easy and gives us such great mobility, it comes with its risks. In recent times, insecure wireless networks have been exploited to break into companies, banks, and government organizations. The frequency of these attacks has only intensified, as the network administrators are still clueless on how to secure wireless in a robust and foolproof way.
BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing: Beginner's Guide is aimed at helping the reader understand the insecurities associated with wireless networks, and how to conduct penetration tests to find and plug them. This is an essential read for those who would like to conduct security audits on wireless networks and always wanted a step-by-step practical guide for the same. As every wireless attack explained in this book is immediately followed by a practical demo, the learning is very complete.
We have chosen BackTrack 5 as the platform to test all the wireless attacks in this book. BackTrack, as most of you may already be aware, is the world's most popular penetration testing distribution. It contains hundreds of security and hacking tools, some of which we will use in this course of this book.
Chapter 1, Wireless Lab Setup, introduces dozens of exercises that we will be doing in this book. In order to be able to try them out, the reader will need to set up a wireless lab. This chapter focuses on how to create a wireless testing lab using off the shelf hardware and open source software. We will first look at the hardware requirements which include wireless cards, antennas, access points, and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, then we will shift our focus to the software requirements which include the operating system, Wi-Fi drivers, and security tools. Finally, we will create a test bed for our experiments and verify different wireless configurations on it.
Chapter 2, WLAN and its Inherent Insecurities, focuses on the inherent design flaws in wireless networks which makes them insecure out-of-the-box. We will begin with a quick recap of the 802.11 WLAN protocols using a network analyzer called Wireshark. This will give us a practical understanding about how these protocols work. Most importantly, we will see how client and access point communication works at the packer level by analyzing Management, Control and Data frames. We will then learn about packet injection and packer sniffing in wireless networks, and look at some tools which enable us to do the same.
Chapter 3, Bypassing WLAN Authentication, talks about how to break a WLAN authentication mechanism! We will go step-by-step and explore how to subvert Open and Shared Key authentications. In course of this, you will learn how to analyze wireless packets and figure out the authentication mechanism of the network. We will also look at how to break into networks with Hidden SSID and MAC Filtering enabled. These are two common mechanisms employed by network administrators to make wireless networks more stealthy and difficult to penetrate, however, these are extremely simple to bypass.
Chapter 4, WLAN Encryption Flaws, discusses one of the most vulnerable parts of the WLAN protocol are the Encryption schemas—WEP, WPA, and WPA2. Over the past decade, hackers have found multiple flaws in these schemas and have written publically available software to break them and decrypt the data. Even though WPA/WPA2 is secure by design, misconfiguring those opens up security vulnerabilities, which can be easily exploited. In this chapter, we will understand the insecurities in each of these encryption schemas and do practical demos on how to break them.
Chapter 5, Attacks on the WLAN Infrastructure, shifts our focus to WLAN infrastructure vulnerabilities. We will look at the vulnerabilities created due to both configuration and design problems. We will do practical demos of attacks such as access point MAC spoofing, bit flipping and replay attacks, rogue access points, fuzzing, and denial of service. This chapter will give the reader a solid understanding of how to do a penetration test of the WLAN infrastructure.
Chapter 6, Attacking the Client, opens your eyes if you have always believed that wireless client security was something you did not have to worry about! Most people exclude the client from their list when they think about WLAN security. This chapter will prove beyond doubt why the client is just as important as the access point when penetrating testing a WLAN network. We will look at how to compromise the security using client side attacks such as mis-association, Caffe Latte, disassociation, ad-hoc connections, fuzzing, honeypots, and a host of others.
Chapter 7, Advanced WLAN Attacks, looks at more advanced attacks as we have already covered most of the basic attacks on both the infrastructure and the client. These attacks typically involve using multiple basic attacks in conjunction to break security in more challenging scenarios. Some of the attacks which we will learn include wireless device fingerprinting, man-in-the-middle over wireless, evading wireless intrusion detection and prevention systems, rogue access point operating using custom protocol, and a couple of others. This chapter presents the absolute bleeding edge in wireless attacks out in the real world.
Chapter 8, Attacking WPA Enterprise and RADIUS, graduates the user to the next level by introducing him to advanced attacks on WPA-Enterprise and the RADIUS server setup. These attacks will come in handy when the reader has to perform a penetration test on a large Enterprise networks which rely on WPA-Enterprise and RADIUS authentication to provide them with security. This is probably as advanced as Wi-Fi attacks can get in the real world.
Chapter 9, Wireless Penetrating Testing Methodology, is where all the learning from the previous chapters comes together, and we will look at how to do a wireless penetration test in a systematic and methodical way. We will learn about the various phases of penetration testing—planning, discovery, attack and reporting, and apply it to wireless penetration testing. We will also understand how to propose recommendations and best practices after a wireless penetration test.
Appendix A, Conclusion and Road Ahead, concludes the book and leaves the user with some pointers for further reading and research.
Pop Quiz Answers, Pop Quiz Answers, concludes the book and leaves the user with some pointers for further reading and research.