Effective WEP Key Retrieval Using AirSnort Wireless Toolset

AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. 802.11b, using the Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP), is crippled with numerous security flaws. . . . AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. 802.11b, using the Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP), is crippled with numerous security flaws. Most damning of these is the weakness described in "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4 " by Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir. Adam Stubblefield was the first to implement this attack, but he has not made his software public. To the best of the authors' knowledge, AirSnort is the first publicly available implementation of this attack.

AirSnort requires approximately 100M-1GB of data to be gathered. Once enough packets have been gathered, AirSnort can guess the encryption password in under a second.

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