The Practice of Network Security: Deployment Strategies for Production Environments

9.3. WEP

SSID by itself does not provide enough security for most administrators. To further secure a WLAN, many administrators will enable Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). WEP is a form of encapsulation that is part of the 802.11 standard.

WEP uses symmetric key encryption to secure data between an end user and an access point. It cannot be used to secure traffic between end users in a peer-to-peer network. The WEP standard specifies the RC4 (a stream cipher designed by Ronald Rivest) pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) algorithm to encrypt key transmissions between the two devices. The key is stored on both the WLAN network card and the access point, and all data sent between the network card and the access point is encrypted using the key. ...