WEP Broken Even Worse

collin.m writes in with news of results out of Darmstadt. Erik Tews and others there have demonstrated how to recover a 104-bit WEP key in under a minute, requiring the capture of fewer than 10% the number of packets the previous best method called for. The paper is here (PDF). Quoting: "We were able to extend Klein's attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets... for 85,000 data packets [the success probability is] about 95%... 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz..."

Comments

Re:Who even still users WEP?

[Eugenia Loli]

Exactly. And then there are lots of PDAs and similar devices that don't have upgradable WIFI cards. Unfortunately, WEP won't go away so fast.

Simple, cheap, easy solution

[DogDude]

Cat 5 cable. It's cheaper, faster, more reliable, and more secure.

Nice try but...

[MarkByers]

WPA can also be broken, and unlike WEP, you only need to sniff one packet. Tools to crack a WPA key are freely downloadable.

Re:Who even still users WEP?

[MobyDisk]

The Nintendo DS only supports WEP.