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Dodgy salesmen in China are making money from long-known weaknesses in a Wi-Fi encryption standard, by selling network key-cracking kits for the average user.. Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China's bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year. With one of the "network-scrounging cards," or "ceng wang ka" in Chinese, a user with little technical knowledge can easily steal passwords to get online via Wi-Fi networks owned by other people. The kits are also cheap. A merchant in a Beijing bazaar sold one for 165 yuan (US$24), a price that included setup help from a man at the other end of the sprawling, multistory building. The link for this article located at PC World is no longer available. . The rise of low-cost Wi-Fi key-cracking kits in China highlights significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities, prompting urgent calls for stronger encryption and security measures. Wi-Fi Cracking Tools, Network Access, Linux Key-breaking Software. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Researchers have decomposed a 768-bit number with 232 decimal places into its two prime factors and published a paper with their results. The number is the string released as "RSA-768" under the now defunct RSA Challenge. As a result, RSA encryptions with 768-bit keys must, from now on, be considered cracked. . It took the team of researchers from Switzerland, Japan, Germany, France, the US and the Netherlands about two and a half years to perform the factorisation. The first step of the calculation, polynomial selection, required half a year on a cluster consisting of 80 PCs, while the second and considerably more labour-intensive sieving step took about two years on a cluster of several hundred computers. According to the researchers, a single Opteron processor with 2 Gbytes of RAM would have needed about 1,500 years to complete the sieving step. The link for this article located at H Security is no longer available. . It took the team of researchers from Switzerland, Japan, Germany, France, the US and the Netherlands. researchers, decomposed, 768-bit, number, decimal, places, prime, factors. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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