Hacking My Home Wifi Part 1

Throughout this year I have been studying many different ethical hacking topics and this topic seemed to be a perfect exercise that I could do at home. Demonstrating how to hack into my home Wi-Fi network is mainly just for "fun" and to cement some of these techniques into my skill set.

Disclaimer: DO NOT DO THIS TO ANY NETWORK THAT IS NOT YOUR OWN. Be a white hat hacker, not black hat one.

Let's quickly discuss the Wi-Fi encryption standards to see how they evolved. WEP is an encryption protocol that was a part of the original standard for 802.11. Used for protecting 802.11a and 802.11b networks, WEP uses the RC4 encryption algorithm with either a 64 bit or a 128 bit key size. In 2001 critical cryptographic vulnerabilities were brought to light that made it known how easy it would be to crack a WEP key. A hacker only needs a certain amount of network traffic to uncover the keystream that can be used to decrypt the ciphertext. It is possible to quickly hack the WEP network shared key using Kali Linux’s Wi-Fi hacking tools such as airmon-ng, airodump-ng, aireplay-ng, and aircrack-ng. More on these later–for now I will move on to new Wi-Fi standards to discuss. WEP should not be used in any network. 

The next standard, WPA, used the same algorithm as WEP but with a temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP). This was just a workaround for the pitfalls of WEP that encrypt each data packet. It was until 2004 until we got a more suitable Wi-Fi standard in WPA2 which uses advanced encryption standard–AES. All of these standards still utilize the pre-shared key method of authenticating a new device into the network. WPA2 is still vulnerable to the same tools I mentioned that are used to hack WEP. These tools can utilize brute force methods of cracking the WPA/WPA2 PSK to gain access to the wireless network. This all comes down to the most vulnerable layer in our networks–the human. Reusing old passwords or using weak passwords makes it easy to hack even WPA2. 

I am going to run through a quick Wi-Fi hacking demonstration just to show how easy it can be to break into your wireless network. There a few different methods out there and here are the tools that they require: 

• A Linux OS such as Kali or Parrot. 
• A Wi-Fi adapter that be put into monitor mode. 
• A client currently connected to the potential hacked network. 
• A human using a poor password to protect their network. 

I will be using a Kali Linux virtual machine on my desktop along with a Alfa AWUS036ACS wireless adapter. I also purchased a TP-Link router from Walmart to create my own little wireless network to crack. In the future I will see if there is any difference in my Eero wireless network.