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WiFi Hacking
WiFi
● WiFi refers to a wireless local area network (WLAN) that works based on IEEE 802.11 standard. It is a widely used technology for wireless communication across a radio channel.
● Personal computers, smartphones, video game consoles, etc. use WiFi to connect to the internet via a wireless network access point.
● Every network card has a physical static address known as a MAC address. This address is unique, and the card manufacturer assigns it.
● This address is used between devices to identify each other and to transfer packets to the right place. Each packet has a source MAC and a destination MAC.
WEP
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a security algorithm for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Introduced as part of the original 802.11 standards ratified in 1997, its intention was to provide data confidentiality comparable to that of a traditional wired network.
A Standard 64-bit WEP uses a 40-bit key (also known as WEP-40), which is concatenated with a 24-bit initialization vector (IV) to form the RC4 key used for encryption. RC4 is a stream cipher; the same traffic key must never be used twice. The purpose of an IV, which is transmitted as plain text, is to prevent any repetition, but a 24-bit IV is not long enough to ensure this on a busy network. The way the IV was used also opened WEP to a related key attack.