802.11 WEP really broken
2001-08-07 23:53:52+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
When we need to go back to representatives of our government and rub their noses in one part of what has been a completely flawed encryption strategy, we can look at this crack of a highly deployed wireless system. Via Hack The Planet, cipher attack delivers heavy blow to WLAN security. Short answer: 40 bit 802.11 WEP can be completely broken in 15 minutes, rendering a whole lot of deployed hardware mostly worthless:
"We all knew it could be done," Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.) said of the attack. "The whole purpose of WEP was to make it difficult, not impossible. Forty bits was all the [IEEE 802.11 Working Group] could legally do at the time.