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A tool for cracking Wireless networks: http://airsnort.shmoo.com/.
Yes, it's possible to crack the encryption of WEP wireless networks. However, it requires examining a LOT of packets - this could be months worth of monitoring. If you have something that is worth someone spending that much effot on, you need to use something more secure or change your keys regularly enough to avoid having sent enough packets to be cracked.
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---August 4, 2004
I don't know about months. Maybe months if your carefull about how your network is set (providing your not carefull enough to change keys often).
On their FAQ page they state that using 128bit encryption you have a 16,000,000 different keys generated, out of that 9,000 will have the weak keys they need. Depending on the password it can take from 1200 to 4500 different "interesting" keys would have to be gathered in order to crack the password.
So pretending you have to have 3000 packets with the special keys in order to crack a specific password, and your packets per second is averaging around 600 it would take around a 3 hours to crack your network.
That would be a pretty loaded network though. In their FAQ they have a senerio were you had 4 employees sharing the same connection using the same password surfing on the net or whatever they said that within 16 days the network would of been cracked.
So if I am right (I could definately be wrong, this is just guesswork), if you change the network access key/password or whatever they call it every night or every couple nights you would be safe. However it wouldn't be a good idea to run a relay for a busy network (say your connecting 2 buildings together in a campus) unless your using extra protection like a encrypted VPN.
It's pretty easy to setup a encrypted tunnel using PPP over OpenSSH if your running a Unix-like OS, so I'd probably use that to connect hosts if security was a concern for a wireless network I'd setup. I'd don't know what to use I had Windows. Microsoft has a VPN protocol that it created and is commonly used, but that has problems of it's own...
--Drag
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