Risk: Informational
It has been reported that 128-bit WEP encryption can now be cracked in just three seconds. The code breaking approach used was created by researchers Erik Tews, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Andrei Pyshkin of Darmstadt Technical University in Germany and was demonstrated at a conference in Hamburg during April. It involves extending the original RC4 vulnerability to the entire WEP protocol, which makes it possible to extract the 104-bit WEP key from an intercepted data stream using a 1.7 GHz Pentium M processor.
The speed and ease with which WEP was cracked reinforces the importance of using WPA encryption, which is much more difficult to crack.