10.1 Introduction

The 802.11 security architecture and protocol is called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). It is responsible for providing authentication, confidentiality and data integrity in 802.11 networks. To understand the nomenclature, realize that 802.11 was designed as a wireless Ethernet. The aim of the WEP designers was therefore to provide the same degree of security as is available in traditional wired (Ethernet) networks. Did they succeed in achieving this goal?

A few years back, asking that question in the wireless community was a sure-fire way of starting a huge debate. To understand the debate, realize that wired Ethernet ^[1] (the IEEE 802.3 standard) implements no security mechanism in hardware or software. However, wired Ethernet networks are inherently secured since the access to the medium (wires) which carry the data can be restricted or secured. On the other hand, in wireless Ethernet (the IEEE 802.11 standard) there is no provision to restrict access to the (wireless) media. So, the debate was over whether the security provided by WEP (the security mechanism specified by 802.11) was comparable to (as secure as) the security provided by restricting access to the physical medium in wired Ethernet. Since this comparison is subjective, it was difficult to answer this question. In the absence of quantitative data for comparison, the debate raged on. However, recent loopholes discovered in WEP have pretty much settled the debate, concluding that WEP fails to achieve its goals.

In this chapter, we look at WEP, why it fails and...