Enterprise Mac Security: Mac OS X Snow Leopard

12.7. Cracking WEP Keys

To drive home why it is so important to practice good security with your wireless environment, let's look at cracking a few types of wireless security protocols. Let's start with a WEP key. There are three steps we will need to go through in order to crack a WEP key. First, we need to locate the AirPort using a tool such as KisMAC.

Second, we need to generate a minimum of 400,000 WEP initialization vectors (random bits of data used to decrypt wireless traffic). We will capture the traffic using Aireplay to generate the required initialization vectors. Aireplay is available at http://www.wirelessdefence.org/Contents/Aircrack_aireplay.htm. Once captured, Airodump will be used to save the captured initialization vectors ...