Researcher Cracks WPA-PSK in 20 Minutes with Amazon Cloud; Cost Him $1.68
January 12th, 2011Via: Register:
A security researcher has tapped Amazon’s cloud computing service to crack Wi-Fi passwords in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of using his own gear.
Thomas Roth of Cologne, Germany told Reuters he used custom software running on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service to break into a WPA-PSK protected network in about 20 minutes. With refinements to his program, he said he could shave the time to about six minutes. With EC2 computers available for 28 cents per minute, the cost of the crack came to just $1.68.
“People tell me there is no possible way to break WPA, or, if it were possible, it would cost you a ton of money to do so,” Roth told the news service. “But it is easy to brute force them.”
