WEP encryption
The WEP protocol was known to be flawed as early as 2000 but, surprisingly, it is still present in a lot of organizations and access points still ship with WEP enabled capabilities.
There are many cryptographic weaknesses in WEP and they were discovered by Walker, Arbaugh, Fluhrer, Martin, Shamir, KoreK, and many others. Evaluation of WEP from a cryptographic standpoint is not required for a basic understanding of how to break it. In this section, we will take a look at how to break WEP encryption using readily available tools on Kali Linux. This includes the entire aircrack-ng
suite of tools: airmon-ng
, aireplay-ng
, airodump-ng
, aircrack-ng
, and others.
The fundamental weakness in WEP is its use of RC4 and a short IV value that is recycled every 224 frames. While this may appear to be a large number, there is a 50 percent chance of four IV reuses every 5,000 packets. To use this to our advantage, we generate a large amount of traffic so that we can increase the likelihood...