Week 5 Discussion 1
"Wireless Penetration" Please respond to the following:

Describe in detail the steps involved in cracking WEP encryption. Discuss the implications of relying on such a legacy protocol today and how essential it is for the IT industry to keep current with technology.

Explain how to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack between a client (user’s computer) and their access point (AP). Discuss two trust issues which revolve around any type of wireless (i.e. Wi-Fi, WLAN, 3G, Bluetooth) communication.

Wep is the basic security encryption mechanism. WEP is weakened by the use of a 24 bit initialization vector (IV) that is reused in a short period of time, thus rendering WEP vulnerable to attack by several readily available cracking tools. One of the challenges of wireless traffic analysis is the ability to inspect the contents of encrypted data frames. Now wireshark has the ability to decode many different network layer and higher protocols, encrypted traffic limits the ability to analyze packets and troubleshoot network problems. Wireshark offers some options to analyze WEP encrypted data. Wireshark offers some options to analyze WEP encrypted data. When configured with the correct WEP key, Wireshark can automatically decrypt WEP encrypted data. When and dissect the plaintext contents of these frames. This allows the administrator to use display filters, coloring rules and other Wireshark features on the decrypted frame contents.

In this day in age WEP is not considered a very good security encryption mechanism. I see the WEP as secure as a house front door. It does the job for keeping out any Joe from just walking in the house. However, it is vulnerable to hackers. It would be cake walk for a hacker to break in.

Technology continues to move rapidly when changes are made in the IT industry. It is vital for the IT industry to stay up with