Cracking WLAN’s WEP in less than a minute
Comments (0) It is already known that WLAN’s WEP isn’t secured. Back in 2001, it was shown that the method of cracking the crypto system RC4 can also be used in cracking the WEP encryption. Then, it needed an estimated of 4,000,000 to 6,000,000 WEP packets in order to crack the secret key used in the encryption. Until recently, the best method requires about 500,000 to 2,000,000 WEP packets which usually takes 10 to 40 minutes.
Now, a group of researchers from Technical University of Darmstadt has managed to bring the figure down to 10% of that. With just 40,000 packets, they are able to achieve a success probability of 50% in obtaining the key. Upping the number of packets to 85,000, they get a staggering 95% success probability.
The researchers has published their report at their website, including the WEP cracking program. They had used and improved on the attack method developed by Andreas Klein in 2005.
Due to the weak security of WEP, the Wi-Fi Alliance had introduced WPA which based partly of the IEEE 802.11i. Later, WPA2 which uses AES encryption was introduced and made mandatory for all new Wi-Fi devices that is Wi-Fi certified.
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