The performance of Blum-Blum-Shub elliptic curve pseudorandom number generator as WiFi protected access 2 security key generator

Abstract

WiFi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) is considered the most secure network security protocol in wireless routers, despite the discovery of partial key exposure vulnerability. In light of, an experiment was conducted to investigate the strength of WPA2 default passwords generated by the algorithms embedded in routers using a simulated brute-force attack. The findings ascertain the prevalence of insecurities in the default WPA2 passwords due to low charset size and weak encryption algorithm. For these reasons, we propose Blum-Blum-Shub Elliptic Curve Pseudorandom Number Generator (BBS-ECPRNG) algorithm as a replacement to the algorithms embedded in routers. To prove its validity, we generated distinct sequences of 10 6 bits each and analyzed sequence output using the NIST statistical test suite. The generated bit sequence of BBS-ECPRNG was converted to password characters and subjected to simulation test. Findings reveal that the BBS-ECPRNG password significantly decreased the password-cracking success by 25 times more as compared to the default WPA2 passwords generated by router-based algorithms in the Philippine market.