Trouble is, with the rise of WLANs has come a whole new breed of security threats. A key research paper released on July 25 by cryptographers Scott Fluhrer of Cisco Systems and Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir of Israel's Weizmann Institute . . .
Trouble is, with the rise of WLANs has come a whole new breed of security threats. A key research paper released on July 25 by cryptographers Scott Fluhrer of Cisco Systems and Itsik Mantin and Adi Shamir of Israel's Weizmann Institute pointed out critical flaws in wired equivalent privacy (WEP), the primary security protocol for WLANs using the now-dominant 802.11b wireless transmission standard (also known as Wi-Fi). The trio later used their knowledge of this flaw to break the encryption on a WEP-protected network -- in a mere 15 minutes.

Then in August, two security consultants released a program dubbed AirSnort for public consumption. AirSnort took Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir's theoretical framework and turned it into solid code that most tech-savvy users could operate with little difficulty. In effect, the program points out the holes in WEP security. It could allow anyone with a laptop running Linux to drive or walk around a city and gain unauthorized access to potentially sensitive wireless networks.

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