Before the standard, different vendors developed several competing solutions to address the same need. It may be intimidated by the available security options to set up Wi-Fi Protected Access and make it easy to add new devices to an existing network without entering long passphrases.
The Wi-Fi Alliance created and introduced the protocol in 2006 to allow home users unfamiliar with wireless security. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about WPS. It may still take hours, but it is far superior to the previous scenario, in which months of brute-forcing would produce no results. It did, however, have a flaw that is now widely known, and tools like Reaver can exploit it in a single-line statement.
Essentially, it was intended to make WPA even more difficult to crack while also making it much easier to configure (push a button on router and device connects). With this in mind, a new security measure, WPA Protected Setup, was introduced to supplement WPA (WPS). But it wasn’t over yet, because the new WPA technology was extremely difficult for users to configure. Finally, the security personnel was at ease. Rainbow tables are known to speed up things by completing a portion of the guessing job ahead of time, but the output rainbow table that must be downloaded from the internet is disastrously large (can be 100s of GBs sometimes). Depending on the length of the password, an exhaustive brute force including all alphabets (uppercase and lowercase) and numbers could take years. Also, good dictionaries are extremely useful. A dictionary attack could take days and still fail. In most cases, hacking WPA/WPA2 is a time-consuming task. When it was discovered that a WEP network could be hacked by any kid with a laptop and a network connection (using easy peasy tutorials like those on our blog), the security guys created a much more robust security measure called WPA/WPA2.
How to break a WPA or WPA2 password with Reaver step by step- and protect your network from attacks by Reaver. Here’s the bad news: Reaver’s new, free, open-source tool uses a wireless router security hole and can crack current passwords on most routers relatively easily. You probably have to secure your network through a more bulletproof WPA security protocol, as you know how easy it is to crack a WEP password. Your Wi-Fi network is a convenient wireless internet gateway, and because you don’t want a connection with any old hooligan who walks past your home, you are securing your network with a password. Penetration testing with Reaver – Kali Linux Tutorial WPA Security Protocol bypassing