This is actually nothing new. Years ago, WEP encryption could be cracked in under 10 minutes. Of course, with the increasing speed and power of computer technology, it only makes sense that WEP encryption can be cracked in a shorter time now. Not only is WEP encryption extremely easy to break into, but it is also a pain in the butt to have to insert all of those hex values for your key. In short, if you haven’t figured it out yet, don’t use WEP; stick with better encryption algorithms such as WPA and WPA2.

Researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt have achieved another breakthrough in cracking WEP encrypted wireless networks. As Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann describe in a paper, they were able to reduce the number of captured packets required for a successful attack by a factor of ten. A wireless network secured with 128-bit WEP encryption can, according to the researchers, be cracked in less than a minute using their attack method. An archive can be downloaded from the working group’s website, which adds the new method to the Aircrack WEP cracking program.

Until now, the most efficient WEP attacks needed between 500,000 and two million WEP packets to calculate the 104-bit key which is used for 128-bit WEP. These could be generated using repeated injection of an encrypted ARP query - ARP reinjection - in about ten to 40 minutes, even if the wireless network was being used only sporadically.[more]

Tags: Encryption