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The final nail in WEP's coffin
Abstract
The 802.11 encryption standard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is still widely used today despite the numerous discussions on its insecurity. In this paper, we present a novel vulnerability which allows an attacker to send arbitrary data on a WEP network after having eavesdropped a single data packet. Furthermore, we present techniques for real-time decryption of data packets, which may be used under common circumstances. Vendor produced mitigation techniques which cause frequent WEP re-keying prevent traditional attacks, whereas our attack remains effective even in such scenarios. We implemented a fully automatic version of this attack which demonstrates its practicality and feasibility in real networks. As even rapidly re-keyed networks can be quickly compromised, we believe WEP must now be abandoned rather than patched yet again.
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Cited by
Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: A Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow
Chen, S., Wang, R., Wang, X., & Zhang, K. (2010) · 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · doi:10.1109/sp.2010.20 · Cited by 397
Practical attacks against WEP and WPA
Tews, E., & Beck, M. (2009) · Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Wireless network security · doi:10.1145/1514274.1514286 · Cited by 257
Release the Kraken: New KRACKs in the 802.11 Standard
Vanhoef, M., & Piessens, F. (2018) · Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security · doi:10.1145/3243734.3243807 · Cited by 57
(2012) · Cited by 17
Uncovering Practical Security and Privacy Threats for Connected Glasses with Embedded Video Cameras
Opaschi, O., & Vatavu, R.-D. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · doi:10.1145/3432700 · Cited by 10
Metadata
- Authors
- Bittau, A., Handley, M., & Lackey, J.
- Venue
- 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2006
- Pages
- 15 pp.-400
- ISSN
- 1081-6011 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2164725724
- Cited by
- 165
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.97
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The final nail in WEP's coffin. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/sp.2006.40
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- Bittau, A., Handley, M., & Lackey, J. (2006). The final nail in WEP's coffin. 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06). https://doi.org/10.1109/sp.2006.40
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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
