How to Break WEP Encryption

Breaking any encryption involves knowing a few things. First, you have to know that there is an encryption scheme. Secondly, you must know how encryption works.

Steps

1. Depending on your operating system, you will need a packet sniffing program. Airsnort for Linux and Windows is a popular program. But only works with cards having a Prism chipset.
2. Find a wireless access point.
3. When using the packet sniffer, allow it some time to get a good sampling of the WEP encrypted packets. In other words, you have to give the program something to work with and match. Public and private keys can be deciphered by matching the packets for similarities!!

Tips

• http://www.insecure.org/tools.html lists the top 75 network security tools, and some others.
• All sniffing programs such as the mentioned Airsnort and Kismet are available as source code. You will need some background in compiling source code for Linux or Windows to use these programs.
• You will probably be able to find already compiled versions of most programs you will need.

Warnings

• This information is to be used ethically. Misuse of this information may be illegal both locally and federally.