Attacks on WEP require packets to be generated on the network, the attack they describe uses ARP requests and responses to get packets needed to crack a WEP key. So what's new about the work done at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt in Germany? The three researchers there (Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann) were able to develop some new statistical models to crack WEP much more quickly. In many ways WEP, as our own Dave Molta says, 'was broken before it was broken.' While it was cryptographically insecure, the whole model of distributing shared keys within a large just didn't scale to meet the needs of the enterprise. 'Hasn't WEP already been broken?' It's true that WEP was proven cryptographically insecure way back in 2001. Many in the blogging community have reported about about some work researchers in Germany are doing with regard to cracking WEP.

We start with this note from Sean Ginevan: Our tech editors debate the security flaws - and competitive alternatives - to WEP, the much-derided security protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) defined in the 802.11b standard.

How long to crack wep