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WEP offers very little protection
Authored by: madoka on Nov 21, '02 12:27:28PM

Maybe you already know this, but I'll say it anyway in case others who read this hint don't know. DO NOT RELY ON WEP FOR ANY KIND OF SECURITY!!!

By security, I mean two things: protecting contents of packets from 3rd parties, and client authentication (allowing/disallowing person X from using your wireless network). Unfortunately, WEP fails to provide either. Furthermore, enabling WEP incurs a performance penalty.

My suggestion would be to leave WEP turned off, and use other methods, such as SSH tunneling for data encryption, and MAC address for client authentication.

Note that although MAC address based client authentication is in principal less secure than WEP, due to the nature of 802.11b both methods fail anyway. There's really no way to do this without using much more sophisticated methods (such as Kerberos). Therefore you may as well not use WEP to avoid the performance penalty.



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