November 7, 2008
Wi-Fi WPA TKIP Key (Partially) Exploited by Researchers
Early coverage of the Wi-Fi WPA TKIP Key crack indicated that TKIP keys were broken, but ars technica clears up the details of the attack:
They are not. “We only have a single keystream; we do not recover the keys used for encryption in generating the keystream,” Tews said.
To describe the attack succinctly, it’s a method of decrypting and arbitrarily and successfully re-encrypting and re-injecting short packets on networks that have devices using TKIP. That’s a very critical distinction; this is a serious attack, and the first real flaw in TKIP that’s been found and exploited. But it’s still a subset of a true key crack.
Arstechnica has a fantastic technical review on the subject.