Wired Equivalent Privacy Weakness

Posted on February 4, 2010 by goodrichr@cs.cofc.edu

On January 26th, 2010, Dr.  Anthony Leclerc spoke at the Association for Computing Machinery meeting held regularly on Tuesdays at 12:15 in JCLong 220.  His topic: How quickly can you break the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption for wireless networks?  Apparently it isn’t that difficult once you have everything set up, and it took about 30 seconds to crack the encryption key.  He was nice enough to provide the instructions and accompanying programs in one easy to access bundle, but only for a Unix environment (Linux verified, Mac and others unverified).

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2 Responses to Wired Equivalent Privacy Weakness

  1. Clay McCauley says:
    March 1, 2010 at 3:10 pm

    WEP actually stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy. A pretty bold name for such a weak encryption scheme. Even its successor WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) has flaws that can allow an attacker to break the encryption. WPA2 corrects the vulnerability in TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) with the introduction of the CCMP algorithm based on AES. If you’re not using WPA2 on your wireless router with AES instead of TKIP, chances are your system is vulnerable.

  2. goodrichr@cs.cofc.edu says:
    March 22, 2010 at 9:59 am

    Thank you for the correction, I fixed the title.