WPA + TKIP has been cracked
Wireless Network is the most popular target for any attacker these days. No doubt, it will get even worse. After WEP has been cracked *easily* for a while, now it’s WPA + TKIP’s turn. Japanese scientist has developed WPA encryption crack system that can break WPA that uses the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm in matter of minutes. Well, some might say this is not new stuff since WPA *can be* cracked for a while now. However, cracking WPA this fast shows that it’s getting worse and worse and using WPA w/TKIP is as much vulnerable as using WEP nowadays.
Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. "They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical," he said.
The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
According to the report, the best practice so far is like what we already know, moving to WPA2 with AES encryption: you will have a strong defense and gain the performance as well, as you may know, with WPA2 with AES, you will lose only less than 10% of bandwidth to all encryption stuff while the rest will waste more than 25% to all the key & stuffs. That’s like a bonus. Nonetheless, if you still carry stuffs from 2006 or older, using WPA/WPA2 might be the best practice. Well, putting your guard down can’t be that bad if you know what you are doing!
Popularity: 1% [?]
Sharing Printer from 64-bit box to 32-bit clients
Well, I was starting to turn all my Windows boxes to 64-bit–all Linux ones are 64-bit already. I expected to see an improvement, but yet to see in practice. Along the way to transform to 64-bit, I had a problem about printer sharing. By the fact that I had network attached printer, you might wonder why I need to share it again. If I told you here that my printer was HP, most of you guys might get it why I prefer to do this way.
- HP drivers are crap.
- It comes with a lot of bloatwares.
- Too many running processes required.
Windows also doesn’t have currently HP printer driver, so I couldn’t print that easily. The advantage of this method is you could just add a shared printer with minimum driver installed on your workstation. Please share if you have a better way to do so.
By the way, Microsoft put some trick making this more difficult than it should be. The idea is when you install the driver on the 64-bit box then share. This is simple. However, this will allow only 64-bit machine to use this shared printer since there is no 32-bit driver or any particular driver for your machine architecture. Simple solution is adding another architecture driver to that. That was an unexpected problem started.
- Add drivers, then it will ask for driver for the architecture you choose–32-bit in this case.
- Browse for the 32-bit drivers.
- Then it will ask for Windows Media (x86 processor) [ntprint.inf file]
- What the heck is that??
- I put VIsta setup disc
- download new drivers
- find the file in %windir%
Those above don’t help. So, how do we know where and what that files are. I just found that it was located in your x86 machine.
%windir%\winsxs\x86_ntprint.inf_******************
That’s where you need to point to or you can just copy that folder out to 64-bit. That would be fine as well. After this, you’ve done. Sit back and relax. All your machine will be able to use the shared printer seamlessly.
Thanks to the development of network, so that we can live our lives much more comfortable
Note: For sharing printer from 32-bit box to 64-bit one, you just have to get the **_ntprint** folder from 64-bit machine, then add driver as procedure above. You will be all set. =)
Popularity: 97% [?]
