Maximum Wireless Security

Practical WEP Cracking

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), as discussed in Chapter 4, “WEP Security” and Chapter 5, “Cracking WEP,” is fundamentally flawed, allowing you to crack it. However, even though it is possible to crack WEP encryption, we still highly recommend that you use it on all your wireless networks. This will thwart the casual drive-by hacker. It also enables another layer of legal protection that prohibits the cracking of transmitted, encrypted signals. With that in mind, let’s look at the practical process of cracking WEP.

The most important tool that you are going to need to crack a WEP-encrypted signal is time. The longer you capture data, the more likely you are to receive a frame that will leak a key byte. There is only about ...