so really....

ok, guys...we all use wireless internet at our homes...right?

so really, how secure are these personal networks (with all the security features on like WPA2 and AES -CCMP). how secure are they, to hackers and people who are trying to spy on ya and stuff. because i really dont want anyone to get in my computer (s)

 

Very very secure. People will tell you WEP is not secure because it can be cracked in about 5-10 MILLION packets (about 2-3 days of collection on an average home network)

WPA is super secure. It uses dynamic keys for the handshakes, so it's virtually impossible to crack.

No one is getting into your network via wireless.

 

actually cracking wep only takes about 15-20 minutes,with a good amount of traffic, or less.

with WPA the person must capture a handshake and then crack that with a dictionary attack, and if the pass isn't in the dictionary file used it won't get it, even if it's an upper case letter when it's supposed to be lower case. and then there's more they'd have to do.

 

5-10 million packets will be about 2-3 days on a standard home network, as I said. Perhaps a very active business network 15-20 minutes... even that seems a bit far fetched to me. I've not personally seen a WEP cracked in less than two hours, and cracking the WEP at the highschool I used to work at took 3 days straight.

 

ok...so what about the WPA....how long dose it take to hack that? because i am using WPA2 -personal (whats the difference between WPA2- personal and WPA2 -enterprise?) oh and whats the difference between WPA and WPA2? which ones are better, etc...?

 

WPA2 is more secure than WPA, as it uses a new encryption algorithm that is currently not possible to crack.

You are not going to notice a difference between WPA2 personal vs enterprise, as they are both the same protection but enterprise has to do with licensing and device compatibility with enterprise level devices. Use WPA with AES-CCMP (this is the fully secure algorithm). Also, you can use mac filtering (which will only allow hardware with certain hardware addresses to connect to the network) for the best security possible.

WPA, as N00d13s mentioned is a shot in the dark. If you use an unsecure key (say, 12345678) as your key, this will be cracked in a matter of minutes via a bruteforce attack. If you use a secure key (say, xW549x%dc*698!@g\Ffj) then it will pretty much never be cracked ever. And since it seems you're paranoid about your security, you might also want to make sure you have all closed off wiring on your network, and use MAC filtering for the wired network as well.

 

Have you Googled for WPA or WPA2? There are tons of links that provide detailed explanations on the security of those types of encrypted networks.

 

now you only need about 40,000-50,000 packets to crack it, which only takes about 10-15 min. to capture.

 

What tool only needs 40-50k? Cause I need to try that out...
I'm used to airsnort.

 

its wireless...will never be as secure as wired. end of story

and you can crack wep in 5 minutes

wpa will take much much longer

 

you just use aircrack, and the newer versions should use PTW by default which only needs 40-50k.

wep is very easy to crack, but so many people still use it.

 

I concur with this. WEP can be cracked(utilizing PTW) in a matter of minutes, not hours.

 

Apparently you dont read the news. WPA can be cracked super fast now using a powerful nvidia 280 graphics card

source for all the non believers: http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/10/10/crack-wpa-ten-thousand-percent-faster-with-cuda/

 

From the article.

What's infinity/100?
Still infinity.
You can't crack WPA like you can with WEP, you can only use dictionary attacks. So as long as you use a really secure key, it will take forever.

 

thanks for all the replies guys...ok so that mac address protection thingy seems intresting....how do i use/enable it?

 

MAC filtering is pretty useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_filtering

Just use WPA2/AES to protect your network.

 

MAC filtering is just a simple layer of security. WPA2 is also a simple layer of security at the end of the day

 

yeah mac filtering isn't much help.all the attacker has to do is clone the mac address.

you can find some good sites that can generate a strong password for you on google.