GoddessJ’s sister (“D”) just had a minor surgery yesterday, and the doctors recommended that she not be left alone. Her husband couldn’t stay with her today, so we and GoddessJ’s parents decided to take it in shifts. It’s not a major inconvenience for any of us; her parents are retired, GoddessJ isn’t working at the moment, and I can work anywhere so long as I have my laptop and Internet access.

It’s that last bit that poses the problem. They have a wireless network, and they gave me permission to use it the last time we were there, but they didn’t know the network password — her husband had set it up, and couldn’t remember what he had set it to, other than “something to do with hockey.” So before we left, I studied the problem carefully.

I couldn’t recall which wireless network protocol they’re using, so I studied both WEP and WPA. I knew from previous reading that both could be cracked, and that WEP was significantly easier than WPA, but I’d never looked into the details before. It was quite enlightening.

Armed with a program called aircrack-ng and a handful of large dictionary files (WPA cracking requires dictionaries), I was ready to tackle the problem.

It turns out that their network was set to use WPA. Capturing the login was simple enough — one of my nieces had come home sick, so I just asked her to turn on the laptop system that had the password already in it. It automatically logged onto the network and I was able to capture the login packets with no problem. I set the system to work on the problem immediately.

Three and a half hours (and several million failed password attempts) later, the other niece got home and asked what I was doing. I told her. “Oh, that one? That’s ****.” Apparently she had remembered it when her father got a new laptop (more recently than the last time we’d been there) and couldn’t connect it to the network, and no one else knew.

I wouldn’t have found it anyway — no only did it include a couple of non-alphabetic characters, it was two words instead of one, and one of them wouldn’t have been in any standard dictionary. But the attempt was interesting.