There have been problems with WEP due to many security issues. In the 802.11 standard, WEP is defined as "protecting authorized users of a WLAN from casual eavesdropping." As such, WEP is not a terribly strong form of protection and is subject to numerous exploits based on vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

These include:

1. A high percentage of wireless networks have WEP disabled because of the administrative overhead of maintaining a shared WEP key.

2. WEP has the same problem as all systems based upon shared keys: any secret held by more than one person soon becomes public knowledge. An example is an employee who leaves a company ... the employee still knows the shared WEP key and could sit outside the company sniffing network traffic or even attacking the internal network.

3. The initialization vector that seeds the WEP algorithm is sent in the clear.

4. The WEP checksum is linear and predictable.

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by KeysCapt
last modified: 2005-01-14 20:40:58