wep stands for a wireless security protocol that uses the shared key to encode the data .It is very easy to stick to because the key can be easy to guess. However, the primary weakness is that it is not a very secure coded protocol. The security can be broken down easily which makes the wireless security protocol inadequate for those applications that are sensitive to security.
Within the limited time, all the wep keys are reused. This major privacy weakness of wired equivalence is the same for all encryption layers ,the reason being that they all use 24-bit IVs.
Wired security protocol:
Wep means , it is a security protocol, designated in the IEEE wireless fidelity standard 802.11b. Although ,the standard is specifically designed to provide security . It can also provide privacy to WLAN (wireless area network) as contrast to what is often expected of a wired LAN.
Working of wep:
The wired equivalent privacy protocol works as gives security similar to a wired network’s physical security through data transmission encoding over WLAN. Data encryption protects unsafe wireless links between clients and the access points.
After the secure transmission over WEP, the LAN security mechanism make sure about privacy and data security which includes authentication, virtual private networks, protection of passwords and end-to-end encryption.
For the wireless network, the basic network security provides the services ,some are listed below:
• Privacy
• Authentication
• Data integrity
• Shared key authentication
• Open system authentication
Cons of WEP:
The wired equivalent protocol is widely implemented but it faces serious security weaknesses. some of them are :
• Cipher:
On the data stream, the coded algorithms applied are referred as stream ciphers. with the key reuse, its easy to attack .The key space is small for this protocol so it’s almost impossible for the key not to be used.
• Optional:
The use of the protocol is optional because most of the users failed to stimulate it when installing the WEP-enabled device.
• RC4 weakness:
The RC4 algorithms come in cryptographic weakness and it is no longer in use.
• Key shared:
For the system like these , the default configuration uses the same key for all the users. You are not able to verify the individual users when all the users have the same key.