Wired Equivalent Privacy
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The Wired Equivalent Privacy or WEP protocol was the original encryption system used in IEEE 802.11 wireless networking. It is now deprecated in favour of the newer system WPA, but WEP is still quite widely deployed.
Some argue that the name itself indicates a fundamental design error. Why should a wireless security system be designed for only "wired equivalent" privacy, only as secure as ethernet?
A number of serious flaws have been found in the WEP system [1].
WEP generates keys for different connections by concatenating a connection-specific intialisation value with another secret value, and this creates a vulnerability. It can be broken by a related key attack [2].
References
- ↑ Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg, and David Wagner, Security of the WEP algorithm
- ↑ Erik Tews, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Andrei Pyshkin (2007), Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds