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I am going to be installing openvpn on a router at home running ddwrt. The other end of the tunnel is a vps running openvpn as a server. The thing is, this means that anyone connected to my wireless network will be able to access the vpn without any credentials at all.

So i am totally relying on a good password for the wireless connection. But is that really safe? I've heard about wireless networks being hacked into and it seems like wireless security isn't that great. People close enough to receive the wireless single have unlimited time to try to crack it...

Is it impossible to hack into a wireless network that has a decent password?

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Any network can possibly be hacked, regardless of password strength. – techie007 Oct 28 '11 at 17:53
Why aren't you establishing your OpenVPN connection on the clients that need it instead of on the router? Have you considered running a OpenVPN server on your router as well? Just have your clients build a VPN to the router if you are really paranoid. – Zoredache Oct 28 '11 at 18:03
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closed as not constructive by techie007, random♦ Oct 29 '11 at 3:13

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2 Answers

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My recomendation is to use a WPA2/AES encryption for your wireless network and try to create a really hard to crack password, something "random" like this website could be useful.

https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

  • The current state of knowledge seems to be that WPA2 is not vulnerable to known attacks (yet) but the wireless key can be cracked by a dictionary/brute force attack so if your wireless key is long and hard enough it could take to many time for your attacker to crack the key.
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That requires trusting the folks who run grc.com. I don't suggest that they're not completely trustworthy, but personally I prefer to generate my own passwords on my own systems. (My WPA passphrase is something like ouzak ihyby ongxc uhhlq mmpgt iwyjp wfmxp nrnil gdlwq grkeo, though of course that's not it. Using only lowercase letters makes it easy to type on mobile devices; using 50 letters makes a brute-force attack effectively impossible.) – Keith Thompson Oct 28 '11 at 18:48
Is there a limit on password length? – Daniel Gratz Oct 28 '11 at 19:30
@Daniel Gratz I think its 63 characters for WPA2, but I'm not 100% sure. – AndrejaKo Oct 28 '11 at 21:22
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up vote 2 down vote

I would never say impossible, but if you use WPA2 security with AES encryption (no TKIP) AND you use a good password (as many random characters as you can handle), then you can sleep well.

And in no way should you ever consider using WEP.

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