Usual and unusual WEP – open/shared key communication

Here, we will discuss two types of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) authentication procedures: open and shared keys. As a matter of fact, discussing WEP is really unnecessary, but we should be aware of how it works because you never know when you might be asked to troubleshoot an old router whose firmware is still not upgraded and just supports WEP as an authentication mechanism.

WEP-open is way better than WEP-shared because even when the password that you provide turns out to be wrong, you will get connected to the network; here, it reduces the chance of getting the router brute forced. If you are using WEP-shared communication, then an experienced hacker won't take more than 2 minutes to crack your strongest key, and because of the small pool of keys that WEP supports, your password won't last long.

So, to begin with, we need the infrastructure to capture packets that are required for WEP-open. A key point to note here...