Enhanced Brute Force Attack And Bypassing MAC Filtering In Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless networks are being used increasingly due to its mobile nature and affinity, with regards to accessing the Internet. The security threats and risks pertaining to wireless networks have increased relatively, and so it has become important to secure these networks. There are various methods available for securing wireless networks like hiding the network and securing it with a key. One such method is MAC filtering, which allows connectivity to clients using MAC addresses. A common technique for cracking any key is the dictionary attack which uses the brute force attack. These keys can permeate to any wireless network, following security standards such as WEP, WPA and WPA2. It is known that brute force attacks consume more time to identify a key, and the probability of success depends on the time taken to extract the key from a captured handshake file and the kind of dictionary created, since it can take indefinite amount of time, if the dictionary file is huge or not relatable. In this pair, we propose an attack to exploit the features of MAC filtering, reduce the time taken by brute-force method to enhance the extraction of the key, save the progress of the extraction through a session and also, work on improving the space complexity