Breaking 104-bit WEP in under 60 seconds

Background:

By its nature wireless communication is much more vulnerable than wired networks to eavesdropping due to the nature of the communication medium. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is a commonly used scheme to secure wireless networks even though cryptanalysts found several vulnerabilities over the years. WEP can be broken using different statistical attacks, with an increased probability of success as more packets are collected. Originally over a million packets were needed to break WEP with a high probability of success. Using an active attack collecting this amount would take at least a dozen minutes and a passive attack would take hours. Over the years optimizations and more vulnerabilities were found, which make breaking WEP today a matter of collecting more than 20,000 packets.

Problem Statement:

In order to build a piece of software that can break 104-bit WEP encryption an in-depth understanding of the RC4 key/cipher text setup needs to be obtained and implemented. Implementing the software would also need to efficiently take advantage of extended arithmetic and efficiently gather packets.

Team Members:

German Kaizer (gary.kaizer@gmail.com)

Faculty Advisor:

Dr. Schmidt (Computer Science)

Dr. Ding (Mathematics)

Goal:

To understand and implement WEP breaking software capable of breaking 104-bit WEP key in under 60 seconds (benchmark).

Helpful Skills:

· Understanding of mathematics.

· Knowledge of object-oriented programming (C++).

· Understanding of TCP/IP/ARP protocols.