Learn Ethical Hacking from Scratch

WPA introduction

In the upcoming parts of this chapter, we're going to discuss Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption. This encryption was designed after WEP, to address all of the issues that made WEP very easy to crack. The main issue with WEP is the short IV, which is sent in each packet as plain text. The short IV means that the possibility of having a unique IV in each packet can be exhausted in active networks, so that when we are injecting packets (or in natural, active networks), we will end up with more than one packet that has the same IV. When it happens, aircrack-ng can use statistical attacks to determine the key stream and the WEP key for the network.

In WPA, however, each packet is encrypted using a unique, temporary key. ...