The Final Nail in WEP's Coffin

  • Authors:
  • Andrea Bittau;Mark Handley;Joshua Lackey

  • Affiliations:
  • University College London;University College London;Microsoft

  • Venue:
  • SP '06 Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The 802.11 encryption standard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is still widely used today despite the numerous discussions on its insecurity. In this paper, we present a novel vulnerability which allows an attacker to send arbitrary data on a WEP network after having eavesdropped a single data packet. Furthermore, we present techniques for real-time decryption of data packets, which may be used under common circumstances. Vendor produced mitigation techniques which cause frequent WEP re-keying prevent traditional attacks, whereas our attack remains effective even in such scenarios. We implemented a fully automatic version of this attack which demonstrates its practicality and feasibility in real networks. As even rapidly re-keyed networks can be quickly compromised, we believe WEP must now be abandoned rather than patched yet again.