My old wired router has seen its better days, and periodically stops working for no reason and I have to reset it. And besides that, once in a while our dog, who likes to sit at my feet under my desk, gets tangled up in the mess of wires back there. My wife and I decided it’s time to install a wireless network at home, which would give us more flexibility, the ability to work in different rooms easily, or even sit in the back yard and surf the Net. It sounded like a good idea until I read about the crack in WPA, which was recently reported by security researchers.

Reports say that two reserachers discovered a flaw in WPA encryption, and were able to crack it in about 15 minutes. WPA is still seen as the more secure alternative to WEP. The undisclosed mathematical crack breaks the TKIP key, which is used to encrypt data that runs between the wireless router and the wireless clients. The only other way to attack a WPA connection is through a brute force attack, but for the most part, the latter can be prevented with good passwords that are long, use random characters, and are not easily guessed. Those who have wireless networks are now encouraged to upgrade to WPA2.

WPA2 goes beyond the WPA requirement for TKIP encryption to include support for AES (Advanced Encryption System). The flaw discovered by the researchers cannot work against AES.

Ars Technica ran a detailed article about the issue. The attack doesn’t sound particularly simple. It’s not a key recovery attack, according to the report, rather, it allows the attacker to decrypt individual packets. It is not possible to use the attack to recover an encryption key, although all the same, it’s a serious flaw. However, some of the early press reports about this flaw were a bit overblown, and WPA is still usable. You don’t have to worry about everybody hacking into your wireless home network. The attack can’t be used to break into the network and steal your bandwidth; and since it allows for decryption of short packets only, it’s not practical to use it to try to decipher very much data. Nonetheless, in terms of security, more is always better, so I’ll be looking at wireless options that are based on WPA2.