Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2007/120

Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds

Erik Tews and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Andrei Pyshkin

Abstract: We demonstrate an active attack on the WEP protocol that is able to recover a 104-bit WEP key using less than 40.000 frames in 50% of all cases. The IV of these packets can be randomly chosen. This is an improvement in the number of required frames by more than an order of magnitude over the best known key-recovery attacks for WEP. On a IEEE 802.11g network, the number of frames required can be obtained by re-injection in less than a minute. The required computational effort is approximately 2^{20} RC4 key setups, which on current desktop and laptop CPUs is neglegible.

Category / Keywords: RC4, WEP, cryptographic protocols, cryptanalysis

Date: received 1 Apr 2007, last revised 16 Sep 2007

Contact author: e_tews at cdc informatik tu-darmstadt de

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Version: 20070916:184625 (All versions of this report)

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