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If you're still using the WEP wireless protocol, please stop. It's not just been cracked, it's been shattered. Seriously.

In the old days -- that's like 2001 -- it was demonstrated that you could crack WEP by capturing and analysing between four and six million data packets. By 2004, improved techniques required between 500,000 and two million packets. And now it requires a mere 40-80,000 packets.

The latest crack comes from three cryptography researchers at the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany who report;

Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good conditions.

But you'll need a supercomputer to process all that data, right? Nope.

The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz and can additionally be optimized for devices with slower CPUs. The same attack can be used for 40 bit keys too with an even higher success probability.

There are now about a zillion sites out there for both Linux and Windows detailing the necessary steps to implement and execute this crack, including this YouTube video. (Pay attention to the PC's clock. The entire process takes just 9 minutes.)

So ditch WEP now! WPA is vastly more secure.


Comments

ha ha been doing this for ages

ha ha, been doing this for ages. thx for the free net, suckas!

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