Networking nerds claim to have devised a way of breaking Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption within 60 seconds. The technique, developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, is based on the established Becks-Tews method, which involves making minor changes to packets encrypted with TKIP - Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, a WPA security mechamism - and then sending those packets back to the access point. However, the Becks-Tews method is known to take anywhere between ten and 15 minutes to execute. In a recently released paper, Ohigashi and Morii proposed a man-in-the-middle style of attack – also used by the Beck-Tews approach – in which a user’s communication is intercepted by an attacker.
