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Wi-Fi Pen-Testing in the WPA3 Era

WPA3 closed most of the holes that made WPA2 a soft target — KRACK, offline dictionary attacks, the four-way handshake capture-and-crack. But WPA3 also has its own weaknesses (Dragonblood, downgrade attacks), and most enterprise networks run WPA3 and WPA2 alongside each other for legacy device compatibility, which means the WPA2 attacks still apply to whichever band is least-protected.

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Network · By Thimmagurudu Bathini · Published · 5 min read · Last reviewed

What we test on a Wi-Fi engagement

  • Encryption mode per SSID — pure WPA3, transition mode, or WPA2 only. Transition mode (mixed) is vulnerable to downgrade.
  • Pre-shared keys — for WPA2, capture the four-way handshake and crack offline against a tuned wordlist. For WPA3-SAE, attempt Dragonblood-style side-channel attacks if the vendor implementation is vulnerable.
  • Enterprise WPA3 — verify EAP-TLS over PEAP, validate server certificate pinning on supplicants, test for evil-twin / rogue AP attacks.
  • Captive portals on guest networks — bypass by spoofing the client's already-authenticated MAC, or by tunneling traffic over DNS before captive-portal redirect kicks in.
  • Segmentation — once on the guest network, can we reach the corporate network? Often, yes.

The deliverable

For Wi-Fi engagements we usually deliver a per-SSID coverage matrix (encryption, segmentation, client posture), the cracked PSKs for any SSID where capture-and-crack succeeded, and a remediation roadmap that gets the network to pure WPA3 or strict WPA3-only. See wireless penetration testing.

Written by Thimmagurudu Bathini, BERRY9 IT SERVICES PRIVATE LIMITED, Hyderabad. Questions about your own systems? Request a scoping call or call +91 86868 92922.

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