Wireless Security - Confidentiality Attacks

The role of attacks targeting the confidentiality of the information, is simply to break the encryption model used in the wireless deployment. Looking at variety of security models in the field the following general recommendations may be put −

• No Encryption/ WEP Encryption − These are not very secure approaches and should not be used under any circumstances.

• TKIP Encryption − This encryption model is used in WPA deployments. It has not yet been cracked, but TKIP is not considered as strong mean of encryption, due to the use of weaker RC4 algorithm.

• CCMP Encryption − This is used with WPA2. So far, it is considered the safest encryption model that is based on not-breakable (at least for today) AES algorithm.

The main goal of all kinds of attacks is to break the encryption and get a value of the key. This would give the attacker 2 things: broken confidentiality of other users and direct access to the wireless network.