Security researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck reported they’ve developed a way of partially crack the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) used by Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to protect data on wireless systems.

The two will discuss the matter in detail during next week’s PacSec conference, which will be held in Tokyo. In the meantime, they provided some information on how they’ve managed to break the encryption in a matter of minutes.

The researchers did not use what’s known as a dictionary attack, which is based on a large number of educated guesses the attacker uses to crack the encryption. Security researchers already knew the TKIP was vulnerable to such attacks.

This time however, Tews and Beck found a way to trick the WPA router into sending a large amount of data, and also used a “mathematical breakthrough” to help break the encryption, as Dragos Ruiu, PacSec conference organizer, explained.

The method proved not only faster than any other method used before, but should also draw alarm signals that attackers could easily manage to decrypt data on wireless networks.

This time, security researchers only managed to crack the data sent from a router to a laptop computer, but not the data sent from a computer to the router.