Exam 312-50v10 topic 1 question 153 discussion

WEP attacks WEP is susceptible to many attacks for a couple of reasons: - The secret shared key 𝑘 is rarely changed (it could take weeks or months before someone thinks about changing it), which means we can consider it a constant in our attacks. - The small IV space (24 bits only) pretty much guarantees there will be IV collisions, if IVs are chosen randomly, which means some frames will be XORed using the same keystream and could be cracked. - The CRC32 check-summing algorithm used by the underlying 802.11 layer is not cryptographically secure, allowing attackers to intercept and modify sent frames - The ACKs sent by the underlying 802.11 layer upon receival of a corrupt frame can be used to build a reaction attack for guessing remaining bytes of an incomplete keystream

TK Maxx's parent company, TJX, had secured its wireless network using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) — one of the weakest forms of security for wireless LANs. Hackers broke in and stole the records — which included millions of credit card numbers — in the second half of 2005 and throughout 2006.