Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) ARASH HABIBI LASHKARI FCSIT, University of Malaya (UM) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia a_habibi_l@hotmail.com FARNAZ TOWHIDI Computer Science Faculty, UTM City Campus Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Farnaz.towhidi@gmail.com RAHELEH SADAT HOSSEINI Faculty of Computer Science, University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, Slovenia rahele_h@yahoo.com Abstract— there are some demonstrable reasons for customers who like use from wireless technology and this is clear because there are various benefits for using wireless technology. The contrast between wireless usage and security techniques growing, show that the security is not adequate enough for this data growing. It’s obvious that the hackers are able to monitor the transmitted data and hack whatever they want. So we see that these days Companies are investing more money on securing their wireless networks. There are three major type of security in wireless. In this paper, at first we try to completely explain the structure of WEP as a first wireless security technique and discuss about all versions of it. At the second step, we discuss about all problems of WEP and finally explain the solutions and improvements that done on this security technique. Then we are in the next plan witch is explain the structure of two other techniques (WPA, WPA2) and we hope that we will publish a completely comparison among wireless techniques in the near future. Keywords— WEP, Wireless, Security, WLAN Protocol, 802.11 I. INTRODUCTION The 802.11 WLAN standards specify the two lowest layer of the OSI network model which are physical and data link layers. The major goals of IEEE for creating these standards were made different approach to the physical layer, for example different frequencies, different encoding methods, and share the same higher layers. They have succeeded, and the Media Access Control (MAC) layers of the 802.11a, b, and g protocols are considerably identical. At the next higher layer still, all 802.11 WLAN protocols specify the use of the 802.2 protocol for the logical link control (LLC) portion of the data link layer. As you can see in Fig.1, in the OSI model of network, such protocols as TCP/IP, IPX, NetBEUI, and AppleTalk, still exist at higher layers. Each layer utilizes the services of the underside layers. “Fig. 1” In WLANs, privacy is achieved by data contents protection with encryption. Encryption is optional in 802.11 WLANs, but without it, any other standard wireless device, can read all traffic in network. There have been three major generations of security approaches, which is mentioned below: • WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) • WPA (Wi-Fa Protected Access) • WPA2/802.11i (Wi-Fa Protection Access, Version 2) Each of these protocols has two generations named as personal and enterprise template. Fig-1: 802.11 AND OSI MODELL II. WEP- STATIC OR PERSONAL The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was designed to provide the security of a wired LAN by encryption through use of the RC4 algorithm with two side of a data communication. A. In the sender side: WEP try to use from four operations to encrypt the data (plaintext).At first, the secret key used in WEP algorithm is 2009 International Conference on Future Computer and Communication 978-0-7695-3591-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICFCC.2009.32 492 2009 International Conference on Future Computer and Communication 978-0-7695-3591-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICFCC.2009.32 492