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  4. Smashing WEP in A Passive Attack
 
conference paper

Smashing WEP in A Passive Attack

Sepehrdad, Pouyan  
•
Susil, Petr  
•
Vaudenay, Serge  
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2013
Fast Software Encryption
20th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption

In this paper, we report extremely fast and optimised active and passive attacks against the old IEEE 802.11 wireless communication protocol WEP. This was achieved through a huge amount of theoretical and experimental analysis (capturing WiFi packets), refinement and optimisation of all the former known attacks and methodologies against RC4 stream cipher in WEP mode. We support all our claims by providing an implementation of this attack as a publicly available patch on Aircrack-ng. Our new attacks improve its success probability drastically. We adapt our theoretical analysis in Eurocrypt 2011 to real-world scenarios and we perform a slight adjustment to match the empirical observations. Our active attack, based on ARP injection, requires 22 500 packets to gain success probability of 50% against a 104-bit WEP key, using Aircrack-ng in non-interactive mode. It runs in less than 5 seconds on an off-the-shelf PC. Using the same number of packets, Aicrack-ng yields around 3% success rate. Furthermore, we describe very fast passive only attacks by just eavesdropping TCP/IPv4 packets in a WiFi communication. Our passive attack requires 27 500 packets. This is much less than the number of packets Aircrack-ng requires in active mode (around 37 500), which is a huge improvement.We believe that our analysis brings on further insight to the security of RC4.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1007/978-3-662-43933-3_9
Author(s)
Sepehrdad, Pouyan  
Susil, Petr  
Vaudenay, Serge  
Vuagnoux, Martin  
Date Issued

2013

Published in
Fast Software Encryption
Series title/Series vol.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science; 8424

Start page

155

End page

178

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LASEC  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
20th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption

Singapore

March 10-13, 2013

Available on Infoscience
June 10, 2013
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/92618
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