Re: WEP

[tom <tallison1@twmi.rr.com>]

Thanks all for the replies.
I've done the RTM thing and have one question.

If the network.opts file doesn't identify the ray_cs module as
having a key, then how do I find out what it is supposed to be? 
Or, more to the point, how can I validate the claim that it does
have 56 or 128 encryption.  And if it doesn't, is it any good at
all?

Adam Shand wrote:
> 
> > 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/
> 
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