Difficulties encountered and solutions （trouble shooting）

In fact, we did not run into serious trouble in this project, but we think it necessary talk about some difficulties involved.

Being not familiar with the software involved in the project may be the most annoying difficulty, because we all had no experience in Linux which we had to type commands into. Fortunately, it did not block us. We soon get used to this through attacking a wireless network with WEP encryption.

Next we continued to decrypt WPA network. However, this was a tough job compared to that of WEP for the more complex encryption. Apparently, enumeration method is not feasible here because the computation would be too much. Thus, we utilized dictionary files to help find the key. Here we met another problem: the dictionary file seemed useless. After a large amount of time, the computer was still working. In this case, we inferred that the dictionary file did not match the network under attack, so we used other dictionary files and we did not succeed until the third one was applied.

At last we encountered the final trouble and it nearly destroyed our project. The trouble occurred on Kismet (the detecting software). At first we did not know how it came at all because we had lock the detecting channel to what we want and everything seemed correct, but we just could not figure out it. The attack was successful, but Kismet showed no information detected and no alert file was generated. We tried every method we could but all in vain. Eventually, the problem became clear, in the same channel, there were also other network frames involved which should be eliminated. So we locked detection to our access point and it made the project go on. Kismet could perfectly detect. Also, about the alert file, it is written every five minutes, so it cannot be seen immediately. In the last trial, we got everything we want and we can declare the success of our project.