Whats wrong with WEP?
WEP has been part of the 802.11 standard since initial ratification in September 1999. At that time, the 802.11 committee was aware of some WEP limitations; however, WEP was the best choice to ensure efficient implementations worldwide. Nevertheless, WEP has undergone much scrutiny and criticism over the past couple years. WEP is vulnerable because of relatively short IVs and keys that remain static. The issues with WEP don’t really have much to do with the RC4 encryption algorithm. With only 24 bits, WEP eventually uses the same IV for different data packets. For a large busy network, this reoccurrence of IVs can happen within an hour or so. This results in the transmission of frames having keystreams that are too similar. If a hacker collects enough frames based on the same IV, the individual can determine the shared values among them, i.e., the keystream or the shared secret key. This of course leads to the hacker decrypting any of the 802.11 frames. The static nature of the shared