64bit wep on orinoco_cs?

David Gibson david at gibson.dropbear.id.au
Wed Jul 17 10:40:11 EST 2002


On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 02:35:15PM -0400, Christopher Abiad wrote:
> If I recall, WEP comes in two flavours.  40 and 128 bit.  40 bit WEP uses 
> a 5 character password.  128 bit WEP uses a 16 character password.

Not exactly.  WEP does come in two flavours, with the underlying
encryption mechanism being 64-bit RC4 and 128-bit RC4 respectively.
However in each case 24 bits of the RC4 key are used for the IV.
Hence the actual settable WEP key is only 40 bits and 104 bits
respectively.  In Linux these can be set either as a hex number of the
appropriate size, or as a string of length 5 or 13 respectively.

Of course card vendors still market it as 128 bit WEP.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson




More information about the wireless mailing list