Vulnerability Analysis of WPA Security Protocols

Wireless data transmission across the air is quite common. Attackers have the ability to sniff all that data. To make sure only the actual recipient could decipher its contents, wireless encryption algorithms were introduced. Now, depending on the level of security being used for data protection, attackers can replay, decrypt, or modify that data. Also, they can launch new kinds of attacks by obtaining man-in-the-middle positions or by using denial-of-service attacks as a preliminary step. This paper demonstrates how an attacker can utilize weaknesses in WPA2 and WPA3 protocols and also obtain access to a Wi-Fi network by exploiting some of those weaknesses. Also, it presents a variety of attack strategies against personal computational devices. Moreover, penetration testing was done on a personal and university network to assess the level of security being used. In the process, three distinct offline dictionary attack strategies were compared as well. Furthermore, we have discussed a number of vulnerabilities that have been addressed by new protocols and that still require the attention of the research community.