Comments on: Debunking the latest fear mongering news on WPA security

By: Nix_Hed

Nix_Hed — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:51:02 +0000

I have WPA2 for my wireless network using a 24 character string with some symbols. I figure that if someone really wants on, they’ll get on, but even using this tool, the fastest Xeon or Core 2 Extreme processors, and as many over-clocked GX280s as the system can handle (complete with cooling tower from a nuclear facility), it’s still going to take someone a long time to crack my password.

@Martin – VPN is only secure as the network it’s on. If you’re in an office with unsecured Wi-Fi connected directly to the office LAN, the VPN isn’t going to secure anything if a wardriver sits outside the building.

By: George Ou

George Ou — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:23:39 +0000

In my VPN versis Wi-Fi security article, I’ve noted that there is a time and place for everything. Obviously you can’t use Wi-Fi security from a remote location and that’s where VPN comes in handy. When you’re in Wireless LAN range, you use WPA Enterprise grade security.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:21:46 +0000

As I noted elsewhere, VPN can be a good solution for some workers: those that use their laptops both on the road and in the office. These people will (hopefully) already have a VPN client configured, so this won’t add any additional work for the IT department.

Still, it’s generally much easier to get onto a network by social engineering instead of guessing PSK’s for a VPN or WiFi connection.

By: nuCrash

nuCrash — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:34:55 +0000

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

This is the OS client folding scores using CUDA for nVidia cards. If you average the CPUs to the GPUs, you come up with about 100 times more power per GPU than CPU. This is probably the basis for the article for coming up with the calculation time.

As I said before though, I think my Dual 9800 GX2 Rig is probably 100 times more powerful than a Quad core Xeon at 3.1 GHz.

The Graphics cards do have the fact that they have to be manufactured in the last two years while the processors can be as old as pentiums and still contribute.

By: nuCrash

nuCrash — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:21:54 +0000

I don’t see the $1000 dollar Graphics boards being needed for this task. $200 9800 GTX could do some damage. A $300 9800 GX2 could halve that task. Two of those cards could decrease the crack time by 2 and may be after spending an extra $200 on a power supply and may be $200 extra on the board, $50 on a hard drive, $40 on RAM, $100 on the KVM and

Dual GTX 280s would be nice, but they don’t have near the power of 2 GX2s. It’s like running a 3.0 GHz Dual Core against a 2.4 GHz Quad core.