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WEP Broken Even Worse

Posted by kdawson on from the give-me-a-minute dept.

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..."

4 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who even still users WEP? by StikyPad · · Score: 0, Troll

    > Who even still users WEP?

    I have precisely zero pieces of 802.11 equipment with WPA support
    So.. your answer is "people who don't upgrade." Not to sound discriminatory, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't including you in the question, much the way when I say "Who doesn't run a firewall?" I'm not including people who still use C64s. Talk to us again when all your hardware supports WPA, but you still use WEP anyway.
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    https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  2. Re:Might be bad news for home linux users... by CatOne · · Score: 0, Troll

    This is a Linux limitation, not a system limitation. OS X has supported WPA Personal for > 2 years, and WPA 2 Personal for at least 1.5 years on all systems.

    Seems if you want a secure system you should stay away from a Linux laptop at home. But that's not really anything new. If you want a system that sleeps/wakes out of the box without tweaks a Mac would work nicely for that as well.

  3. Re:Who even still users WEP? by eXFeLoN · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm still trying to figure out why you need such encryption on your Nintendo? I mean is you Mario save game that friggin' important?

    --
    My other sig is a knife wound.
  4. Encryption, like DRM, by cadeon · · Score: 1, Troll

    Is dead.

    With our current MO towards encryption, there is always a way to break it- it's just a matter of computing power, and that's a metric that's ever-increasing. It's no longer sufficent to think a method is strong simply because of the amount of power it takes to break it- because that power will be available to the public next week.

    We need to rethink encryption as a whole, or rethink what information we transmit electronically.