Investigating AirSnort and WEP Issues in Wireless Security Protocols

A hacking tool which can recover the encryption keys used to "protect" data sent over wireless networks has been released on the Internet. AirSnort is one of the first tools that automates the process of breaking in wireless networks and . . . A hacking tool which can recover the encryption keys used to "protect" data sent over wireless networks has been released on the Internet. AirSnort is one of the first tools that automates the process of breaking in wireless networks and takes advantages of flaws in the Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP) which were highlighted by a group of cryptographers a couple of weeks ago.

This group, among them Adi Shamir, documented weaknesses in the key scheduling algorithm of RC4, which forms part of WEP. From there it was a short step to the development of AirSnort, which passively monitors the transmissions of a wireless Lan, computing the encryption password when enough packets (between 100MB-1GB) have been gathered.

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