A WEP post-processing algorithm for a Robust 802.11 WLAN implementation

Authors:
Taskin Kocak;Mohit Jagetia
Affiliations:
Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UB, UK;Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA
Venue:
Computer Communications
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol used within the IEEE 802.11 standard has ''major security flaws'' thus wireless local area networks (WLANs) using the protocol are vulnerable to attacks. In this paper, we propose a scrambling algorithm that reduces the security vulnerabilities of the WEP. The algorithm randomizes the data and prevents access from unauthorized users by adding some standard randomness to it. This random characteristic is a function of the private attribute shared between transmitter and receiver only. In this approach the randomness is achieved by RC4 algorithm, and the distribution of the randomness is provided with different algorithms to increase the complexity of rectifying the encrypted data and optimize utilization of the randomness. The algorithm is developed with a consideration for the least computational requirements to achieve both power and cost efficiency. The proposed software solution takes the WEP output as input and the original WEP implementation is not touched, thus it is an easy patch for the deployed systems.