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ANALYSIS OF WEP PERFORMANCE ON MOBILE
DEVICES
Arnulfo Ochoa Indart
1
, Jesús Arturo Pérez Díaz
2
,
1 Informatic Graduate Program, ITESM Campus Cuernavaca, Paseo de la Reforma 182-A,
Cuernavaca, México
2 Electronic and Communications Department, ITESM Campus Cuernavaca, Paseo de la
Reforma 182-A, Cuernavaca, México
Keywords. Wireless Networks, 802.11b, WEP, Performance, Mobile Devices
Abstract. Mobile devices are becoming more popular
every day; they must
keep up with security implemented by desktop computers. This paper tries to
evaluate performance of data transmission with and without ciphering tech-
niques. WEP is not the best way of securing a network but it is widely used,
that is why we used WEP on these tests. This article tries to define how much
performance is lost with WEP, so we can estimate the loss of performance on
mobile devices when TKIP and WPA’s MIC protocols are implemented. We
observed in the results that decrease on performance was more noticeable on
PDAs than other devices such as laptops
1 Introduction
Ever since wireless networks appeared, many questions concerning security issues
were made. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was part of IEEE’s 802.11 standard,
and it attempted to provide secure wireless communications.
In 802.11 WEP uses a secret 40 bit key (weak) or 128 bit key (strong) in 802.11b and
a pseudorandom
number generator (RC4). Two processes are applied to clear text;
one of them ciphers data and the other one protects it from unauthorized modifica-
tions while in transit. The secret key is concatenated with a random initialization
vector (IV) that adds 24 bits to the resulting key. This key is processed in the pseudo-
random number generator that outputs a large pseudorandom key stream. The trans-
mitter combines it with the clear text using an XOR operation, creates the ciphered
text and sends it to the receiver along with the IV. When the receiver gets the ci-
phered text, it uses the IV and its own copy of the secret key to generate the same key
stream as the transmitter. The receiver combines them with the XOR operation and
generates the original clear text.
Ochoa Indart A. and Arturo Pérez Díaz J. (2004).
ANALYSIS OF WEP PERFORMANCE ON MOBILE DEVICES.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Information Systems, pages 324-330
DOI: 10.5220/0002686203240330
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