On enhancing the WEP security against brute-force and compromised keys

The IEEE 802.11 standard uses Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) for data encryption in wireless Local Area Networks. So far, different flaws have been discovered in the security of WEP. Frequently changing the encryption key can improve the security of WEP but there is no built-in provision for this in the standard. In this paper first we present and critically review different possible methods of automatic key updating and then propose a dynamic key management technique. The proposing technique works at the application layer. It is an automated encryption key updation method that can significantly improve the security of WEP without requiring any changes in the standard or at the lower layers of the OSI model.