[PLUG] Setting Up WEP Key

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at comcast.net
Sun May 16 10:17:02 UTC 2004


On Saturday 15 May 2004 18:37 pm, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   I've googled without finding the answer to my questions about
> setting up a WEP key for the SOHO WiFi portion of the network. The
> LinkSys/Cisco WAP is configured (thanks to Russell and Kurt), and the
> Orinoco Gold card worked immediately in the IBM ThinkPad 600E (when
> '/etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia start' was run).
>
>   From what I've read, the KEY="..." line goes in wireless.opts on
> the portable (it's running Slackware-9.1) and in the appropriate
> place on the wireless hub.
>
>   But, how to select a WEP key? Do I just pick any 12 (or so) hex
> pairs? Is there any rhyme or reason to selecting a key that will be
> as secure as any other in a very low volume (1 portable, not on all
> the time) environment?
>
>   I also have a question about WAP placement. On my computer desk in
> the office I have a bookshelf. If I put the WAP on the top shelf it's
> surrounded on two sides by the particle board side and back. Do I
> need a box or something to raise the antennae above the verticals?
> The portables will be used the den (about 30 feet as the radio waves
> fly through walls) and, possibly, the back yard if it's ever nice
> enough (but not too light to see the LCD screen). My searches on the
> Web have yielded all sorts of hits but nothing pertinent to these two
> questions.
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich

Any reason for not using WPA over WEP? I understand if you have legacy 
issues like OS and/or hardware that doesn't support WPA as we've faced 
that problem in the office with Win2K. New access points and/or 
wireless routers should support WPA in some fashion. WPA supports more 
advanced encryption where new encryption keys are generated after some 
set interval. 

For my own WIFI porting of my home network I use a Linksys WAP54G access 
point with WPA Preshared Key enabled and it supports either TKIP or AES 
encryption with WPA enabled. I used AES encryption and a group key 
renewal of 300 seconds. WPA works fine with WinXP and under Linux I'm 
using the "wpa_supplicant" daemon on my laptop that runs SuSE 9.0. I 
couldn't find the "wpa_supplicant" daemon on the SuSE CDs so I had to 
build it from the source. 

For managing WEP keys under Linux I use the "kwifimanager" program that 
is part of KDE. At some point it would be nice to have a unified 
process for managing both WPA and WEP but so far I have found that I 
need two different pieces of software to do this and I don't really 
have the time for any further experimentation.

WEP scares the heck of me since it is my understanding that good 
cracking programs exist to allow someone to crack a WEP key after the 
program sniffs a sufficient number of packets from a given wireless 
network. This may not be so easy on a small home network with a couple 
of machines that aren't generating millions of packets but say in an 
office that has 20-30 people all using WIFI it wouldn't take long to 
generate millions of packets on the network.

I'm still amazed at how many of my neighbors have WIFI in their home and 
in some cases they have the default SSID "linksys" broadcasting and WEP 
isn't even turned on. Sadly I the vendors are to blame as even the 
Linksys quick start guide recommends just using the defaults so 
everything just works. That's really dumb since it doesn't take into 
account that adjacent houses all may have the of the same AP or router 
broadcasting the same SSID and are all set on the same channel. :-O

I'm sorry as I probably didn't really answer all of your questions since 
I'm pretty limited in my WIFI experience.

Tony

-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at comcast.net





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