From: Daniel Lowd (lowd@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 24 2004 - 02:32:39 PST
This paper gave an overview of the insecurities of the 802.11 WEP
protocol. One strength was the wide range of possible attacks discussed,
based on the resources and access of the attacker, and the type of
wireless environment. It also gave perspective into how these weaknesses
come about, and what alternate techniques would be successful or
unsuccessful in avoiding them. This paper covered a lot, while remaining
very accessible.
What the paper did not do is demonstrate end-to-end hacking solutions.
There were no charts showing the relative effectiveness of different
strategies under different scenarios... but perhaps this is for the best.
The aim wasn't to find the most effective methods, but simply document
their variety to show that the security was weak in many ways.
This brings up the interesting ethical concern: when is the publication of
vulnerabilities a bad idea? By documenting weaknesses in a system, one
may inadvertently aid attackers more than anyone. I think that this paper
was a good idea for two reasons: first, if no one pointed out these
weaknesses, highly-private networks would rely on them until a truly
serious compromise occurred; second, the authors provide good security
tips, both for long-term protocol design and for immediate deployment.
The biggest weakness of this paper is that some issues are not discussed
in full depth. For example, it doesn't spend much time discussing MAC,
even though MAC is hailed as a partial solution to all of this. How does
MAC avoid the problems of WEP?
Overall, I think that this paper covers a lot of ground, and its coverage
is very accessible. This approach, applied with an important result, led
to a wide and well-deserved impact.
-- Daniel
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