WEP encryption

The WEP protocol was known to be flawed as early as 2000, but surprisingly it is still continuing to be used and the 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 beyond the scope of this book, as it involves understanding complex math. Here, we will look at how to break WEP encryption using readily available tools on the BackTrack platform. This includes the entire Aircrack-Ng suite of tools—airmon-ng , aireplay-ng , airodump-ng , aircrack-ng , and others.

Let us now first set up WEP in our test lab and see how we can break it.