Kirkian Computing

Tag: wireless

  • Offensive Security Wireless Professional (OSWP)

    In April 2019, I took the Offensive Security Wireless Attacks (WiFu) course and the OSWP exam. (Along with PenTest+ and Microsoft 365 Fundamentials, this was my third exam in a month!)
    NB This course was later rebranded as PEN-210, but this blog post refers to the older course.

    In brief, I enjoyed this. I thought the content was interesting, and the exam was actually fun (similar to an escape room). However, the course material was written in 2014 and it could do with an overhaul; Offensive Security updated the OSCP in Feb 2020, so hopefully they will do the same for the OSWP at some point.

    In particular, the course objectives include these:

    • The student will learn to implement attacks against WEP encrypted networks.
    • The student will learn to implement attacks against WPA encrypted networks.
    • The student will learn alternate WEP and WPA cracking techniques.

    So, is this course/certification still relevant? How many people are actually using WEP/WPA rather than WPA2 (or open networks that don’t need cracking)? WiGLE (Wireless Geographic Logging Engine) has some stats on this. Here’s a snapshot from 2020-06-07:

    In particular:

    • 5.26% on WEP
    • 5.01% on WPA

    So, that’s about 10% of wireless networks. Based on that, I can see the skills being useful. However, when I scanned my local (residential) neighbourhood, I couldn’t find any WEP/WPA networks. Any new router from an ISP should come pre-configured with WPA2, and it’s been that way for several years now. I also wonder how up to date those stats are, i.e. whether the WEP networks still exist.

    The good news (as a pen tester) is that the same attacks will work on WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK. According to WiGLE’s stats, 67.5% of networks use WPA2, although unfortunately they don’t show a breakdown of Personal vs. Enterprise. If you’re using WPA2-Enterprise (802.1X authentication) then you’re safe against these attacks. However, in my anecdotal experience there are a lot of WPA2-PSK networks out there.

    So, that’s a roundabout way of saying that yes, this exam is still relevant.

    If you run a wireless network (at home or at work), how worried should you be? Before I did this course, I’d already heard that WEP is essentially worthless; now that I’ve experienced this from the attacker’s perspective, I can confirm that’s true. WPA2-PSK can be cracked, but it relies on a dictionary attack; if you’ve got a random passphrase then you’re pretty safe, e.g.
    ~*TJ8H|^u@<)Fk05Uq}t;5?N\v(bv<4s-nT`H””yA$(ha.bEP”+jEg)”&y({Fr

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  • CWTS

    Last month, I took the Certified Wireless Technology Specialist (CWTS) exam. This is issued by CWNP, who are similar to CompTIA, i.e. it’s a vendor-neutral exam rather than being based around specific technology (e.g. Cisco access points).

    The CWNP website says: “The CWTS certification validates the knowledge of enterprise WLAN sales and support professionals who must be familiar and confident with the terminology and basic functionality of enterprise 802.11 wireless networks.” Similarly, when I booked the exam on the Pearson Vue website, they list it as: “PW0-071: Certified Wireless Technology Specialist – Sales (CWTS)”. This exam isn’t a pre-requisite for any of the higher qualifications, so you could start with the CWNA instead (“the foundation level enterprise Wi-Fi certification for the CWNP Program”). As I understand it, the main difference between the CWTS and the CWNA is “what vs. how”, although I don’t really know enough about the CWNA yet to comment in detail.

    Having said that, I learnt a lot by preparing for this exam, and I think there is quite a bit of technical detail in here. For instance, here’s section 3.6 of the exam objectives:

    Understand and apply basic RF antenna concepts

    • Passive Gain
    • Beamwidth
    • Simple diversity
    • Polarization

    I think there are a lot of IT professionals who would struggle to define all of those terms. Similarly, here’s one of the sample questions from the start of the textbook:

    What can contribute to voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) in an IEEE 802.11g wireless LAN circuit?

    1. Output power of the access point
    2. Impedance mismatch
    3. Gain of an antenna
    4. Attenuation value of cable

    So, this is a bit more involved than just saying “Buy a wireless router and plug it in at home”!

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  • BlackBerry vs Exchange 2007

    Exchange 2007 has a few options for remote access to email: you can use Outlook Web Access, or ActiveSync with a smartphone. In particular, it only takes a couple of minutes to configure an iPhone. However, yesterday it took me all day to get a BlackBerry working.

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