My Research

hacking the so called wifi-> starting the crack-----> first, it's important to note the efforts that the designers of wpa went through to secure wpa. the four-way handshake was designed to occur over an insecure channel using plaintext, but still provide a means of authenticating and initializing a secure connection between two devices. at no time is any key actually transmitted over the air. the pre-shared key (psk) is first converted to a primary master key (pmk), which is then used to create the primary transient key (ptk). the ptk is broken down into several parts, one of which is the mic (message authentication code) key. this value is then used to create a message digest value (hash) that is appended to each packet for validation. note that a hash, by definition, cannot be used to recreate the original data. as a result, at no time is sensitive data exposed to an attacker. the problem isn't directly related to the algorithm or wpa initialization process , but is instead tied to the simple fact that the process can be reproduced. \this fact, combined with the reality that most users select poor passwords, provides an opportunity that can be exploited. note both the wpa and 802.11i documentation recommend a minimum 20-character password. unfortunately, this small tip is buried in a lot of highly technical information, and therefore unavailable to the typical soho user.