Wlan Wireless Local Area Network Security Analysis And Research

The IEEE 80211 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP, encapsulation of 80211 data frames The goal of WEP is to provide data privacy to the level of a wired networkThe 80211 design community generally concedes that the WEP encapsulation fails to meet its design goal, but widely attributes this failure to WEP's use of 40-bit RC4 as its encryption mechanism Even at this late date, it is still repeatedly suggested, asserted, and assumed that WEP could meet its design goal by migrating from 40-bit to 104- or 128-bit RC4 keys insteadThis report seeks dispel this notion once and for all: it is infeasible to achieve privacy with the WEP encapsulation by simply increasing key size The submission reports easily implemented, practical attacks against WEP that succeed regardless of the key size or the cipher In particular, as currently defined, WEP's usage of encryption is a fundamentally unsound construction; the WEP encapsulation remains insecure whether its key length is 1 bit or 1000 or any other size whatsoever, and the same remains true when any other stream cipher replaces RC4 The weakness stems from WEP's usage of its initialization vector This vulnerability prevents the WEP encapsulation from providing a meaningful notion of privacy at any key sizeWPA greatly increases the level of over-the-air data protection and access control on existing Wi-Fi networks It addresses all known weaknesses of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), the original native security mechanism in the 80211 standardWi-Fi Protected Access fixes all known vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi network security and greatly enhances data protection and access control on existing and future Wi-Fi wireless LANs It provides an immediate, strong, standards-based, interoperable security solution that addresses all known flaws in the original WEP-based security...