Time for me to start recommending routers with dd-wrt and NO WPS capabilities. If turning it off doesn’t turn it off then security is non-existent for wireless network. Ick.
The attack took about six hours to properly guess the PIN and return the SSID and password for the target network. During that time, the router locked up once under load, as I was putting normal levels of network traffic through it from other devices. Some routers will also lock out WPS requests for five minutes or so when they detect multiple failed PIN submissions—mine stopped responding occasionally, generating a string of warnings, but Reaver picked back up where it left off once the Linksys started responding again.
Having demonstrated the insecurity of WPS, I went into the Linksys’ administrative interface and turned WPS off. Then, I relaunched Reaver, figuring that surely setting the router to manual configuration would block the attacks at the door. But apparently Reaver didn’t get the memo, and the Linksys’ WPS interface still responded to its queries—once again coughing up the password and SSID.
The tool also managed to repeatedly cause the router to stop responding to other computers on the network, essentially creating a denial of service attack—a great thing to remember for the next time my neighbors have a loud, all-night Call of Duty session.
In a phone conversation, Craig Heffner says that the inability to shut this vulnerability down is widespread. He and others have found it to occur with every Linksys and Cisco Valet wireless access point they’ve tested. “On all of the Linksys routers, you cannot manually disable WPS,” he said. While the Web interface has a radio button that allegedly turns off WPS configuration, “it’s still on and still vulnerable.”