Module 013 Wireless Attack
Module 013 Wireless Attack
MODULE 13
Contents
13.1 Learning Objectives ........................................................................................................... 3
13.2 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3
13.3 Wireless Fidelty (Wi-Fi)(802.11) ...................................................................................... 3
13.3.1 Capturing 802.11 frames ............................................................................................. 4
13.4 Wireless Security ............................................................................................................... 7
13.4.1 Attacks ........................................................................................................................ 8
13.5 Wireless Attacks Detection Techniques .......................................................................... 10
13.5.1 Wireless Access Point Monitoring............................................................................ 10
13.5.2 Wireless Client/Node Monitoring ............................................................................. 10
13.5.3 General Wireless Traffic Monitoring........................................................................ 11
13.6 Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems ............................................................................. 11
13.6.1 Snort-wireless ........................................................................................................... 11
13.6.2 WIDZ ........................................................................................................................ 12
13.6.3 Bro............................................................................................................................. 12
13.7 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 12
13.8 Check Your Progress ....................................................................................................... 13
13.9 Answers to Check Your Progress .................................................................................... 13
13.10 Further Reading ............................................................................................................. 14
References, Article Source & Contributors..................................................................... 14
Wireless Attacks
13.2 INTRODUCTION
Wireless forensics is a sub-discipline of network forensics. The main goal of wireless forensics
is to provide the methodology and tools required to collect and analyse (wireless) network
traffic that can be presented as valid digital evidence in a court of law. The evidence collected
can correspond to plain data or, with the broad usage of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technologies,
especially over wireless, can include voice conversations. Analysis of wireless network traffic
is similar to that on wired networks; however, there may be the added consideration of
wireless security measures. Wireless networks have entered in a paramount way in the day-to-
day life of people as well as enterprises. The wireless has added convenience of mobility and
thus introduced risks on the traditional networks.
We will first look into wireless technologies (mainly 802.11) through the wireless frame layer
(OSI Layer) and understand how they can be captured, extracted and analysed. After that we
will learn various wireless attacks and the intrusion detection systems in wireless layers.
Wi-Fi provides service in private homes, businesses, as well as in public spaces at Wi-Fi
hotspots set up either free-of-charge or commercially, often using a captive portal webpage for
access. Organizations and businesses, such as airports, hotels, and restaurants, often provide
free-use hotspots to attract customers. Enthusiasts or authorities who wish to provide services
or even to promote business in selected areas sometimes provide free Wi-Fi access. A service
set is the set of all the devices associated with a particular Wi-Fi network. The service set can
be local, independent, extended or mesh. Each service set has an associated identifier, the
Service Set Identifier (SSID), which consists of 32 bytes that identifies the particular network.
The SSID is configured within the devices that are considered part of the network, and it is
transmitted in the packets. Receivers ignore wireless packets from other networks with a
different SSID.
The 802.11 logical architecture consists of several components (see Figure 1): station (STA),
wireless access point (AP), independent basic service set (IBSS), basic service set (BSS),
distribution system (DS), and extended service set (ESS). STAs and Aps are hardware devices.
The wireless STA has an adapter card, PC Card, or an embedded device to facilitate wireless
connectivity. The wireless AP provides access to wireless STAs by becoming a bridge between
STAs and the existing network backbone for network access.
Monitor mode
Monitor mode, or RFMON (Radio Frequency MONitor) mode, allows a computer with
a wireless network interface controller (WNIC) to monitor all traffic received from the wireless
network. Unlike promiscuous mode, which is also used for packet sniffing, monitor mode
allows packets to be captured without having to associate with an access point ad hoc
network first. Monitor mode only applies to wireless networks, while promiscuous mode can
be used on both wired and wireless networks. Monitor mode is one of the seven modes
that 802.11 wireless cards can operate in: Master (acting as an access point), Managed (client,
also known as station), Ad hoc, Mesh, Repeater, Promiscuous, and Monitor mode.
Software such as KisMAC or Kismet, in combination with packet analysers that can
read pcap files, provide a user interface for passive wireless network monitoring. In many
cases, monitor mode support is not properly implemented by the vendor. Linux's interfaces for
802.11 drivers support monitor mode and many drivers offer that
support. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD also provide an interface for
802.11 drivers that supports monitor mode and many drivers for those operating systems
support monitor mode as well.
Kismet
Kismet is a network detector, packet sniffer, and intrusion detection
system for 802.11 wireless LANs. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw
monitoring mode, and can sniff 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n traffic. The program
runs under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X. The client can also run
on Microsoft Windows, although, aside from external drones (see Figure 2), there's only one
supported wireless hardware available as packet source. Distributed under the GNU General
Public License, Kismet is free software.
Kismet in tandem with wireshark can be used to capture and analyse wireless packets. Major
attributes that need to be located and further analysed are: wireless packets, basic system ID,
Frame Sequence number, WEP etc. Packets captured by Kismet can be saved into pcap files,
which are then analysed by some analyser tools by opening those files in an offline mode.
NetStumbler
NetStumbler (also known as Network Stumbler) is a tool for Windows that facilitates detection
of Wireless LANs using the 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g WLAN standards. It runs on
Microsoft Windows operating systems from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. A trimmed-down
version called MiniStumbler is available for the handheld Windows CE operating system. No
updated version has been developed since 2005.
i. Wardriving: Wardriving is the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person
in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer, smartphone or personal digital
assistant (PDA).
ii. Verifying network configurations
iii. Finding locations with poor coverage in a WLAN
iv. Detecting causes of wireless interference
v. Detecting unauthorized ("rogue") access points
vi. Aiming directional antennas for long-haul WLAN links. (A directional
antenna or beam antenna is an antenna which radiates or receives greater power in
specific directions allowing for increased performance and reduced interference from
unwanted sources.)
Pcap
In the field of computer network administration, pcap (packet capture) consists of
an application programming interface (API) for capturing network traffic. Unix-like systems
implement pcap in the libpcap library; Windows uses a port of libpcap known asWinPcap.
Monitoring software may use libpcap and/or WinPcap to capture packets travelling over
a network and, in newer versions, to transmit packets on a network at the link layer, as well as
to get a list of network interfaces for possible use with libpcap or WinPcap.
WEPWedgie
WEPWedgie is a open source toolkit for determining 802.11 WEP keystreams and injecting
traffic with known keystreams. The toolkit also includes logic for firewall rule mapping,
pingscanning, and portscanning via the injection channel and a cellular modem
13.4.1 Attacks
Wireless systems encounter attacks which are in some cases similar to network attacks.
However, the attacks which are typically specific to wireless systems are:
a) Probing and surveillance.
b) Denial of Service.
c) Impersonation or MAC Spoofing.
d) Man in the middle.
Probing and surveillance
Probing or sniffing can be of two types:
a) Active
b) Passive
Attackers can indulge in active probing where they send probe requests and continuously wait
for a probe response. The response will contain SSID information and many other information
from nodes or access points in the range. Certain access points are cloaked, i.e. they are
configured not to respond with a probe request. In such cases the attacker might not get any
active response hence will not be able to probe or sniff into these access points.
In passive probing the attacker keeps on listening on all available (or listenable) channels for
all the packets that are sent or received. While doing this the attacker doesn’t have to send a
single packet into the transmission channel. But, cloaked Access Points with no wireless
activities during the period of the probe would not be detected. Because there is no probes the
cloaked Access Points will not send any packets into the channel, thus, the attacker will never
be able to sniff into those Access Points.
NetStumbler is a good example of a tool that can help in active probing is. Kismet is a software
tool that facilitates passive probing. The Data gathered during probing can be saved into pcap
format (see previous section) for future analysis while in offline mode. On a non-encrypted
stream in the network, the attacker could immediately find or probe into a traffic stream and
can easily acquire vital information MAC address, IP address range, and gateway etc from the
traffic.
In case of encrypted streams like Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP), then WEP crackers
which are available with the attacker can be used. For example, airodump can be used to gather
all the encrypted packets transmitted and aircrack (see previous section) is then used to try to
crack the WEP key. If there is no sufficient traffic on the network, certain tools for packet
injection like WEPWedgie (see previous section) can be used to insert random traffic into the
WEP encrypted network. This will fetch responses from the network; these response packets
can be collected and given for WEP key cracking.
Denial of Service
DoS type attacks at every wireless layers can be easily carried out in a wireless network. Noise
I the channel can be induced by emitting a very strong Radio Frequency interference on the
channel in which the wireless network is operating on this will cause interference to all wireless
networks that are operating on that channel or nearby channels. Certain DoS attacks can utilize
packet injection, the attackers will flood the network connected clients with lots of disassociate
or authentication packets.
Impersonation(spoofing)
Another attack is called as impersonation, where the attackers change their MAC address in
the transmission packets with an address that he had found while probing. This is typically used
by criminals to send derogatory mails like intimidation etc. A MAC address might belong to
an authorized client in the network. This is usually done to defeat the MAC filtering capabilities
of access points where only a list of authorized MAC addresses are allowed to use the wireless
network. As earlier described, even if the wireless network is WEP encrypted, the MAC
address of the sending and receiving party is still viewable by a wireless sniffing tool. MAC
spoofing is a technique for changing a factory-assigned Media Access Control (MAC)
address of a network interface on a networked device. The MAC address is hard-coded on
a network interface controller (NIC) and cannot be changed. However, there are tools which
can make an operating system believe that the NIC has the MAC address of a user's choosing.
The process of masking a MAC address is known as MAC spoofing. Essentially, MAC
spoofing entails changing a computer's identity, for any reason, and it is relatively easy. MAC
address can be changed in linux using ifconfig command. In windows we can do this using
registry.
For wireless clients that are legitimate, there is a sequence number field within the IEEE 802.11
header which can be tracked for abrupt changes. Certain times when impersonation attacks are
being carried out, the attacker will be able to read the MAC / IP address of the victim, but it
will not be able to continue with the sequence number used previously by the victim, thus by
monitoring the sequence number in these client generated packets impersonation attacks can
be easily detected.
13.6.1 Snort-wireless
Snort's open-source network-based intrusion detection system (NIDS) has the ability to
perform real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
Snort can be configured in three main modes: sniffer, packet logger, and network intrusion
detection. In sniffer mode, the program will read network packets and display them on the
console. In packet logger mode, the program will log packets to the disk. In intrusion detection
mode, the program will monitor network traffic and analyse it against a rule set defined by the
user. The program will then perform a specific action based on what has been identified. Snort-
wireless is a wireless intrusion detection system adapted from the snort IDS engine. One can
write snort-wireless rules for detecting wireless traffic like one would detect for IP layer
attacks.
13.6.2 WIDZ
WIDZ version 1 is a proof-of-concept IDS system for 802.11 that guards an AP(s) and
Monitors local frequencies for potentially malevolent activity. It detects scans, association
floods, and bogus/Rogue AP's. It can easily be integrated with SNORT or RealSecure.
13.6.3 Bro
Originally written by Vern Paxson, Bro is an open source Unix based network monitoring
framework. Often compared to a Network Intrusion Detection Systems(NIDS), Bro can be used
to build a NIDS but is much more. Bro can also be used for collecting network measurements,
conducting forensic investigations, traffic baselining and more. Bro has been compared to
tcpdump, Snort, netflow, and Perl (or any other scripting language) all in one. It is released
under the BSD license.
Bro Event Engine; which analyses live or recorded network traffic or trace files to generate
neutral events.
Bro uses an engine (written in C++) to generate events when "something" happens. This can
be triggered by the Bro process, such as just after initialization or just before termination of the
Bro process, as well as by something taking place on the network (or trace file) being analysed,
such as Bro witnessing an HTTP request or a new TCP connection. Bro uses common ports
and dynamic protocol detection (involving signatures as well as behavioural analysis) to make
a best guess at interpreting network protocols. Events are policy neutral in that they are not
good or bad but simply signals to script land that something happened.
Events are handled from within Bro policy scripts (written in the Turing complete Bro scripting
language). By default Bro simply logs information about events to files (Bro also supports
logging events in binary output), however it can be configured to take other actions such as
sending an email, raising an alert, executing a system command, updating an internal metric
and even calling another Bro script. The default behaviour produces net flow-like output (conn
log) as well as application event information. Bro scripts are able to read in data from external
files, such as blacklists, for use within Bro policy scripts.
13.7 SUMMARY
1. Wireless networks have entered in a paramount way in the day to day life of people as
well as enterprises. The wireless have added convenience of mobility and thus
introduced risks on the traditional networks.
2. The IEEE 802.11 protocol and associated technologies are the basis of present day
wireless networking.
3. Various ways of sniffing into wireless frames are by using capabilities of monitor mode.
4. WEP is an old IEEE 802.11 standard from 1999, which was outdated in 2003 by WPA,
or Wi-Fi Protected Access. WPA was a quick alternative to improve security over WEP.
The current standard is WPA2.
5. Attacks which are typically specific to wireless systems are Probing and surveillance,
Denial of Service, Impersonation or MAC Spoofing, Man in the middle.
6. Wireless attack detection techniques can be categorized in following three basic forms;
Wireless Access point monitoring, Wireless client/node monitoring, Wireless traffic
monitoring.
7. Few examples of open source wireless Intrusion Detection Systems that are available
for usage are Snort-wireless, WIDZ, RealSecure.
a) Monitor mode is one way of capturing packets and applies to both wired and wireless
networks.
b) pcap (packet capture) consists of an application programming interface (API) for
capturing network traffic.
c) WEP enabled node is highly secured.
d) WPA stands for Wireless Protection and authentication.
e) Active probing is where an attacker sends probe requests and continuously wait for a
probe response from an access point.
f) Impersonation is to use captured MAC address while communicating.
g) Wireless Access Point Monitoring helps in detecting spoofing and man in the middle
attacks.
h) In Wireless Client/Node Monitoring the administrator continuously sends probe
packets to clients connected to an access point.
a) (F)
b) (T)
c) (F)
d) (F)
e) (T)
f) (T)
g) (T)
h) (F)