Enhanced Security Scheme For IEEE 802.11 Over Wired Equivalent Privacy

The security of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) is becoming a bottleneck for its further applications. At present, many standard organizations and manufacturers of IEEE 802.11 WLAN are trying to solve this problem. The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless networks includes a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol to provide confidentiality, authentication, and integrity between a host and a wireless access point, using a symmetric shared key approach, as good as that of a wired LAN. The WEP standard uses RC4 (stream cipher algorithm), IVs (Initialization vectors) improperly, and the attack exploits this design failure. Based on the analysis on the security mechanism of IEEE 802.11 WLAN, we have noted various security flaws in the WEP protocol discovered by various people. This paper describes some of these flaws and a new proposal to enhance the security of the existing WEP protocol.