Wireless Hacking
Wireless Hacking
http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-07/ftp/wireless_hacking/
Abstract:
This paper is a survey of wireless attack tools focusing on 802.11 and Bluetooth. It includes attack tools for three major categories: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality attack tools focus on the content of the data and are best known for encryption cracking. Integrity attacks tools focus on the data in transmission and include frame insertion, man in the middle, and replay attacks. Finally, availability attack tools focus on Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction 1.1 Wireless Attack Tools 2.0 Confidentiality Attacks 2.1 Confidentiality Attack Tools 3.0 Integrity Attacks 3.1 Integrity Attack Tools 4.0 Availability Attacks 4.1 Availability Attack Tools 5.0 Bluetooth Attacks 5.1 Bluetooth Attack Tools Summary References List of Acronyms
1.0 Introduction
There are three main principles to computer network security. They are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. All three concepts are needed, to some extent, to achieve true security. Not using all three concepts in the security of the network will leave it vulnerable to attacks. Attackers strive to compromise one or more of the three main security principles. [1] The basic definition of confidentiality is assuring that sensitive information will be kept secret and access limited to the appropriate persons. In network security, confidentiality can be achieved with data encryption. Data encryption scrambles plaintext data into unreadable cipertext data. Integrity can be defined as unimpaired, complete, undivided, or unbroken. In network security this means that the message has not been tampered. No portion of the message has been removed, rearranged, or changed. The basic security measure to ensure integrity is to generate a cryptographic checksum of some sort to guarantee the message is unaltered. Finally, availability means that data should be accessible and usable upon demand by an authorized user or process. An availability attack consists of some sort of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. A DoS attack prevents the user or device from accessing a particular service or application.
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Having strong network security does not mean one can prevent the network from being attacked. It simply means that the security mechanisms implemented are just that secure and have not been broken yet. Computer and network security is constantly evolving. Strong security mechanisms must also evolve. As older mechanisms are broken or cracked, new ones must be developed.
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Figure 1 - Man in the Middle Attack Figure 1 illustrates a man in the middle attack. The authorized user will be faked into connecting to the unauthorized user instead of the AP. The unauthorized user will be able to alter the message sent between the authorized user and the AP in order to attack the security. AP phishing or "Evil Twin" is a confidentiality attack where the user is tricked into trying to logon to fake APs thus providing their credentials to the attacker. Attackers will setup these phony APs and create fake logon pages in hopes to collect users' personal information including credit card information. The user may also be coerced into downloading a series of trojan horses. They may also use these fake APs to invoke man in the middle attacks. [34] There are a variety of confidentiality attacks, but they all have one common goal - to gather the private information of a user. One or more of the attacks can be used. These include eavesdropping or sniffing, man in the middle attacks, and AP phishing.
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Figure 2 shows a screenshot of Wireshark. Each different color indicates a different protocol identified. When the user selects a packet, the details of that packet are displayed below. The sniffing programs work well for information that is sent in the clear. For encrypted information, an encryption key cracker is necessary. For 802.11, WPA2 is the latest wireless encryption standard that has not been broken yet. WPA and WEP are two previous encryption schemes with many tools available that will crack their encryption keys. AirSnort [6] is a well known for WEP and AirCrack [7] is an attack tools for WPA. Ettercap [8] and dsniff [9] are two popular man in the middle attack tools. They both provide sniffing capabilities similar to Wireshark, but go beyond that with the ability to modify the data in transmission. Again these are available for many platforms. Ettercap even has a tutorial on how to write your own plugin. Tools such as Hotspotter [11], APsniff [12], APhunter [13], and KNSGEM [14] will scan for wireless AP beacon signals. Although they are not necessarily attack tools, they can b e used to find the wireless APs. KNSGEM will even place the APs on a Google Earth map. Attackers will then setup their Evil Twin AP near these legitimate ones. HermesAP [15] and OpenAP [16] are two Linux based tools that allow the user to setup phony APs. OpenWRT [17] and HyperWRT [18] are two open source projects that replace the factory firmware for Linksys's popular WRT line of APs. Attackers can use these distributions to create fake APs. Table 1 - Summary of confidentiality attack tools Tools AirSnort AirCrack Ettercap, dsniff, and Wireshark Hotspotter, APsniff, APhunter, and KNSGEM HermesAP and OpenAP OpenWRT and HyperWRT Description Brute force WEP cracker WPA cracker Packet sniffers with traffic analysis. These also include tools to break encryption. Type of Attack Encryption Cracker Encryption Cracker Packet sniffing
Discovers WLANs by listening for beacon AP locator signals transmitted from APs. Used to setup an rogue Evil Twin AP Replacement firmware so APs can be Fake AP programmed to execute creation attacks.
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attacks. One integrity attack is frame injection. This is when an attacker will inject their own Ethernet frames in the middle of the transmission. This can be used in a variety of ways to attack the user. The user can be misled into accepting frames that it did not intend. All the major Internet browsers were vulnerable to a frame injection attack. This vulnerability has been fixed, but it does give an example on how this can be used as an attack. An attacker could inject frames into a transmission to display their content with the legitimate outer web page frames of another company. For example, a user would access their banking web page and it would look like their legitimate web page, but the attacker has injected Ethernet frames so that even though the web page looks legitimate it is not. When the user attempts to login all the login information can be recorder by the attacker. It is relatively easy to inject spoofed packets in a wireless network. When communicating with a web server there is a delay of tens of milliseconds while waiting for a reply. This is plenty of time for spoofed packets to be injected and the legitimate packets to be deleted. This is similar, but not exactly the same as the man in the middle attacks. Packet injection can be used to generate a DoS attack as well. In 802.11, the AP and wireless device attempting to connect to it will trade associate and authenticate messages. When disconnecting, they will exchange deauthenticate messages. Packet injection tools can be used to issue deauthenticate messages for the IP addresses in the network, that could easily be obtain from sniffing the traffic. This would cause the valid device to be disconnected from the AP. Similarly an attacker can delete or jam the data being transmitted. For example, an attacker could jam the wireless signal from reaching its intended target and also provide acknowledgments (ACKs) back to the source. The data would never reach the intended target, but the sender would have no idea, since it would see the ACKs. Data replay is yet another attack on data integrity. This involves the attacker capturing authentication information and saving it for later use. This can be used for 802.1X Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) or for 802.1X Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) authentications. Once the attacker has captured and saved the authentication information, it will monitor the traffic for another authentication. Then it will inject those frames instead of the legitimate authentication frames and essentially gaining access to a system.
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Tools Airpwn
Description Allows for generic 802.11 packet injection Allow the specified file be used as packet payload. Allows previously captured packets to be injected back into the network.
File2air
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Figure 3 - Beacon Flooding Figure 3 shows an example of the beacon flooding attack. The legitimate AP emits a legitimate beacon signal that the user will look for. The fake AP is emitting many fake beacon signals. The user has a much better chance of trying to connect to one of the fake beacon signals rather than the one legitimate one. This leads to a DoS since the user cannot connect to the legitimate AP. Another type of DoS attack is radio frequency jamming. In this case the attacker jams the frequency of the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN); most likely with a much higher power level allowed by the regulation. This will not allow anyone access to the WLAN. Again the idea of a DoS attack is to prevent the user from gaining access to the network. This is done by attacking certain pieces of the network usually those needed to connect to the network. Flooding and RF jamming are two examples of DoS attacks.
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is another flooding attack tool. It has the ability to implement three different flooding attacks: deauthenticate clients, authentication flood, and association flood. The deauthenticate attack floods the WLAN with deauthenticate packets for random MACs. Those legitimate users connected with matching MAC address will close their connection upon receiving the deauthenticate packet. The authentication attack again floods the network with authentication packets so legitimate user cannot connect. The same is with the association packets. There are a variety of availability attacks. All of them implement a DoS attack of some sort whether it is radio frequency (RF) jamming or network flooding. There also are many different flooding attacks with just a few examples given here. Flooding attacks promote the vulnerabilities of the protocols. Table 3 - Summary of availability attack tools Tools FakeAP Description Generate thousands of 802.11 beacon signals. Type of Attack Flooding DoS
Void11
Can be used to execute deauthenticate, Flooding authenticate, and DoS association flooding attack.
Many Jams the RF signal so that it RF commercial cannot be distinguished by jamming tools available a legitimate device. Back to Table of Contents
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devices. Once the key regeneration is done, the attacker has full access to any services provided by the victim's device.
BlueSmack Issues ping of death attack BlueChop BluePass BlueSnarf Disrupts and existing piconet Causes a buffer overflow attack
Summary
In this paper we discussed several attack tools for 802.11 and Bluetooth systems. Since both of these protocols are a major part of everyday lives, many attack tools exist. The attacks can be categorized into three major categories: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality attac ks include sniffing, encryption cracking, and AP attacks. Integrity attacks include attacks on the data while in transmission. This includes frame manipulation, addition, and subtraction. Finally, the availability attacks in all DoS attacks. Presented were wireless hacking tools and possible attacks on wireless networks. Although wireless networks will probably never be completely secure because research on protocol vulnerabilities will always continue, one can keep their network as secure as possible. Staying educated on the latest encryption schemes and other network security related items is probably the best way to keep your network secure. You will not be able to stop the sniffing of your traffic; however, you can prevent the attacker from being able to decipher the traffic. The protocols
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will continue to evolve to keep unauthorized devices from connecting to a wireless network. However, even the latest security methods have their weaknesses. For example, WPA2, the latest encryption method, does not address the problem of dissociation and deauthentication attacks, but does address many of the issues with WEP. The attack tools are easy to obtain, easy to install, and have detailed web pages or forums that include directions on how to obtain, install and use. Many of the tools are multi-platform which makes it even easier to use. As the network security field grows in complexity, the attack tools will evolve. Back to Table of Contents
References
These reference are ordered approximately in usefulness and relevance to this survey paper. [1] "Wireless Attacks A to Z", http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid14_gci1167 611,00.html March, 2006 [2] "Top 5 Wireless Tools", http://sectools.org/wireless.html, 2006 [3] "The Top 10 Hacker Attack Tools", http://www.thenetworkadministrator.com/2005tophackingtools.htm [4] "Recon and Attack Tools", http://www.wi-foo.com/index-3.html [5] "Wireless Attack Primer", http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Wireless_Attacks_Primer.html, July 2004 [6] "AirSnort", http://airsnort.shmoo.com/, The Schmoo Group [7] "AirCrack", http://www.wirelessdefence.org/Contents/AircrackMain.htm [8] "Ettercap", http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ [9] Song, D., "dsniff", http://monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/ [10] Combs, G., "Wireshark", http://www.wireshark.org/ [11] Moser, M., "Hotspotter - Automatic wireless client penetration", http://www.remote-exploit.org/codes_hotspotter.html [12] "APsniff", http://www.zdnet.de/downloads/prg/w/i/de0DWI-wc.html, April 2004 [13] "APhunter", http://www.attackprevention.com/article/aphunter-2618.html [14] "KNSGEM", http://www.rjpi.com/knsgem.htm [15] "HermesAP", http://hunz.org/hermesap.html [16] "OpenAP", http://www.seattlewireless.net/OpenAP [17] "OpenWRT", http://openwrt.org/ [18] "HyperWRT", http://hyperwrt.org/ [19] "Airpwn", http://airpwn.sourceforge.net/Airpwn.html July, 2006 [20] "File2air", http://www.wolfslair.nl/php/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=62
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[21] "AirJack", http://sourceforge.net/projects/airjack/ [22] "Simple-replay", http://www.802.11mercenary.net/simple-replay/ [23] Black Alchemy Enterprises, "FakeAP", http://www.blackalchemy.to/project/fakeap/ [24] Floeter, R., "Void11", http://www.wirelessdefence.org/Contents/Void11Main.htm [25] Laurie, A., Holtmann, M., Herfurt, M., "BlueSmack", http://trifinite.org/trifinite_stuff_bluesmack.html [26] Laurie, A., Holtmann, M., Herfurt, M., "BlueChop", http://trifinite.org/trifinite_stuff_bluechop.html [27] Gianluigi Me, "Exploiting buffer overflows over Bluetooth: the BluePass tool", WOCN 2005, March 2005 [28] Laurie, A., Holtmann, M., Herfurt, M., "BlueSnarf++", http://trifinite.org/trifinite_stuff_bluesnarfpp.html [29] Laurie, A., Holtmann, M., Herfurt, M., "BlueBump", http://trifinite.org/trifinite_stuff_bluebump.html [30] "Bluetooth Attacks", http://www.viruslist.com/en/analysis?pubid=181198286 [31] "Top 3 Attack Tools Threatening Wireless LANs", http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/webcast.aspx?docid=161061 [32] "Wardriving Tools", http://www.wardrive.net/wardriving/tools [33] "Widely Used Attack Tools", http://www.networkdictionary.com/security/Widely.php [34] Phifer, L "Anatomy of a Wireless "Evil Twin" Attack (Part 1)", http://www.corecom.com/external/livesecurity/eviltwin1.htm 2005 [35] "Wi-Foo, The Secrets of Wireless Hacking", http://www.wi-foo.com/index-2.html [36] Wilds, B., "Wireless Man in the Middle Attack Part 2", http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/wireless/networks/archives/wireless-man-in-the-middle-attack-part-ii-7421 Back to Table of Contents
List of Acronyms
ACK AP DoS EAP ISAKMP MAC MSCHAP OBEX OPP RADIUS RF Acknowledgment Access Point Denial of Service Extensible Authentication Protocol Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol Medium Access Control Microsoft Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol Object Exchange OBEX Push Profiler Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service Radio Frequency
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Wired Equivalent Privacy Wireless Local Area Network Wi-Fi Protected Access
Back to Table of Contents Last Modified: December 02, 2007. Note: This paper is available on-line at
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