Increasing Wireless Security with TKIP
Source: Security Administrator
The current wireless networking standards use security technology that's far less secure than it could be. For example, most wireless network administrators are familiar with the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which uses RC4 encryption to help protect data as it travels over the airwaves.
However, researchers have proven that intruders can easily crack WEP. Last year, a team of researchers published "Weakness in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4," a paper that describes a series of vulnerabilities that make WEP vulnerable. In roughly the same time frame that the paper was published, someone posted Perl scripts on the Internet that helped demonstrate how vulnerabilities in WEP could be verified. You can read about the paper and the scripts in an editorial I wrote in August 2001.
