Is WEP ever appropriate?
How insecure is Wired Equivalent Privacy?
The short answer is that Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is badly broken and only fit for a few low-security uses. Wireless communications are, for obvious reasons, far more susceptible to eavesdropping and unauthorized access than wired communications, and WEP was intended to provide a cryptographic 'wrapper' around the communications channel to protect it. Unfortunately, both the design and implementation of WEP were badly flawed, and attackers are able to crack open the encryption and listen in on - or modify - the 'real' data without much effort. To make matters worse, these attacks have been turned into 'script-kiddy' tools, so the skill level needed to crack WEP is now close to zero. As the final nail in the coffin, these attacks grow faster and simpler with every increase in bandwidth and CPU speed. L33tdawg: DO NOT USE WEP ... That's the bottom line if you value your privacy / securtiy. If you want to be secure, use WPA2 or even better; just tunnel everything over a VPN.
