What’s wrong with WEP?

What’s wrong with WEP?
WEP sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it? It keeps your data safe while
it’s floating through the ether by encrypting it, and it keeps others off your
access point by not authenticating them. In fact, it’s pretty good. Notice that
we didn’t say that WEP is great or superb or awesome. Just pretty good.
We’re actually being somewhat generous. With the proper tools and enough
network traffic to analyze, a dedicated network cracker can break WEP (or
independently figure out the WEP key by using some mathematical techniques)
in a relatively short time. In the business environment, where a ton of traffic is
traveling over the wireless network and valuable business secrets are part of
this traffic, this is a pretty big deal. The math to break WEP is pretty hard
(you’re not going to do it in your head), but plenty of freely available tools
are on the Web that let a computer do it relatively quickly.
We’re being generous with WEP because we strongly believe that in the home
environment — particularly in the suburbs and other less-than-densely populated
areas — the chances of you having someone who can pick up your signals
AND be motivated to go through all the trouble of breaking your WEP
code are pretty darn slim. No one’s ever tried to do it to us, and we don’t
know any folks who have had this happen to them at home. So we don’t
sweat it all that much.
But we do think that WEP needs to be improved. We use wireless networks at
work too, and we’d like additional security. The final section of this chapter,
“Looking into the Crystal Ball,” talks about some newer systems that are on
the way which will complement or supplant WEP entirely and offer greater
security.
We’re writing Wireless Home Networking For Dummies here, not Secure Office
Wireless Networks For Dummies. More sophisticated security systems are
available now for business networks that can improve upon the security of a
wireless LAN. Many of these systems rely upon using stronger encryption
systems called Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which encrypt all data leaving
the PC (not just wireless data) with very strong encryption. You might
even have a VPN system on that work laptop that you bring home with you
every night. VPN is great, and as long as your router supports VPN tunneling,
you should be able to connect to the office network from your home LAN
using your VPN client. But VPN technology is not anywhere close to being
cheap, simple, and user-friendly enough to be something that we’d ever recommend
that you install in your house to secure your wireless LAN.