Seven Deadliest Wireless Technologies Attacks

CHAPTER 1

802.11 Wireless – Infrastructure Attacks

Publisher Summary

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the original encryption scheme included in the 802.11b wireless standard from 1997. WEP is based on the RC4 stream cipher algorithm, and as with any stream cipher, identical keys must not be used. The initialization vector (IV) changes with each packet and eventually repeats, giving an attacker, two packets with identical IVs. The counter used for IVs in the previous years was 24 bits long, which on a fairly busy network meant that there was a good chance that after 5,000 packets, an IV would be repeated, yielding an IV collision where two packets were encrypted with the same key, thus providing a basis for cryptanalysis. The advent of the ARP ...