What Is The Primary Weakness Of Wired Equivalent Privacy (Wep)?

What is the primary weakness of wired equivalent privacy (WEP)?
The WEP stands for wired equivalent privacy. It is mainly used for 802.11 products. The main aim to define the wired equivalent privacy is to give the security mechanism to the wired local area networks.
It can also be used to protect the MAC protocol. It is the major idea of the wired equivalent protocol. But how do this WEP works?. How the WEP protects and provides security mechanisms to the Mac protocol and the wired local area networks.

Now let us learn how the wired equivalent privacy works?. The wired equivalent privacy (WEP) uses a default key in order to encrypt the MPDUs. It also uses the RC4 algorithm. The RC4 algorithm is a type of stream cipher. But what is stream cipher?.

In the RC4 algorithm, the data gets exhort with the help of the secret key. These secret keys are generated randomly, which are generated bit by bit. The result of this process is the encrypted ciphertext. Now, this encrypted ciphertext is transmitted to the destination address. After the destination receives the packet, it tries to retrieve the packet back to the form of the plain text.

To convert the ciphertext into the form of the plain text, it uses the same secret key that is used for the encryption and exhorts the ciphertext with the same key result. Let us know how this is possible to convert a plain text to ciphertext.
For example, let us take a plain text that exhorts with the help of a key and the result of this exhort is the ciphertext, this result is sent to the destination address, now the destination exhorts the ciphertext using the same key which is used for the creation of the plain text. This stream cipher is unbreakable. Here the key that is generated is purely the random number.

The RC4 algorithm is not secure because we cannot generate a pure random number. One random key must be used only in one plain text. It cannot be used by any other plain texts. But in the wireless quantum, we do not have any quantum key generating algorithm. The RC4 is the key generating algorithm that is used to generate the key in the wired equivalent privacy. And for the integrity of the RC4 algorithm, we are using CRC 32.

Now let us know some of the weaknesses and drawbacks and problems in the wired equivalent privacy. The key size which is using by the RC4 and is not sufficient. The RC4 uses the 40-bit secret key and the 24 bit IV that is shared by the wireless devices and the access points. This key size is not enough for today’s applications.

The CRC 32 cannot detect all errors and there may consist of some authentication problems in it and also the key distribution problem.
These keys can be obtained easily because of their small implementation lengths. By providing enough packets, it makes easy for the cryptanalyst in order to retrieve the keys.