Re: WEP

[Adam Shand <larry@spack.org>]

> Suggestion: don't trust WEP.  It's another layer of obscurity, but
> it's designed wrong and not at all secure.  Some past articles on /.
> have links to papers by people who've broken WEP.  I wouldn't trust it
> to keep my spare change secure.

sorry i have to speak up, i'm no huge lover of wep but that's due to
limitations in it's shared key architecture which makes it useless for
community networking [1] (what i do in my spare time :-). two things:

* wep is effective at doing what it was designed to provide, "wired
  equivelent privacy".  this means that all it was supposed to do was
  provide the same level of privacy as normal cat5 did.

* at this point of the exploits are theoretical and none of them are
  trivial (requiring significant amounts of time, disk space and techincal
  sophistication). i have never heard of the wep exploits actually
  appearing "in the wild" and heard contradictory stories of them every
  being fully and sucessfully demonstrated in the lab.

i'm not saying wep is great, but so long as you're careful about keeping
your key secret, choose a non-obvious essid and you're not a likely target
(eg. you're not the pentagon or amazon.com) i'd feel fairly comfortable
relying on wep to keep intruders away from my wireless network.

adam.

[1] http://www.personaltelco.net/