Tip: Recover your Wireless WEP/WPA keys with WZCook

Disclaimer: I don't advocate the use of these tools to do anything illegal, but it IS important that you know they are out there. Use it at your own risk!

AirCrack-ng
http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php

Now, I'm not going to be one to say that I've not used um... "questionable" utilities in my day, but I will say that when I use them, they are really for a noble purpose, really! And, as a network administrator, we should be aware of such tools so we know what everyone and anyone has access to so we can protect ourselves against them.

But, just like anything, there are two sides to every story...there are good uses for these tools as well.

Just recently, I came into a situation where I needed to configure a laptop for one of my users, as his Sony VAIO died a non-eventful death. I knew that I could get the new one configured 90% at the office, and then wanted to hand it to him so he could get going as soon as possible at home. Finally, I could remote connect to him there and finish things up.

But, one problem - If I am going to configure his laptop to just "hop on" his wireless LAN, then what was his WPA key for his access point? It had never been documented...

However, it was on my laptop.

How to get it? Enter the "questionable" tool. :)

Aircrack-ng is a suite of wireless utilities that can help a (nefarious or security analyst) person get into your wireless network by sniffing packets and trying to reconstruct the needed security key and SSIDs. Obviously, a potentially dangerous package indeed.

But, there is one tool that is of notable interest...which can be used by system administrators (and home users alike who want to back up their wireless network settings before system rebuild) for a genuinely good purpose.

WZCook.exe is a small GUI-based utility that can scan your Windows Zero-Configuration settings and export your saved WEP and WPA entries to a text file.

Once the keys were exported, I was able to recreate his Wireless networks complete with his correct WEP/WPA keys, making the migration to the new PC much less painful than necessary.

To get WZCook, just download the Windows package for Aircrack-ng, then check the 'bin' directory for the executable.

NOTE: This works for the Windows Zero Configuration setup only, and if you use a third party client manager tool, it may not work as expected.

Alternate:

• Wireless KeyView (thanks for the anonymous tip!)