WEP attacks based on IV Collisions

From: Jason Ostrom (justiceguy_at_pobox.com)
Date: 04/28/04

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    Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 20:38:26 -0500
    To: pen-test@securityfocus.com
    
    

    Hello,

    In trying to determine the degree of sophistication it takes to
    decipher a WEP key based on IV Collisions, I have a Pcap dump with
    kismet sniffer and steadily increasing IV Collisions. A couple of
    questions.

    First, correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like a non-trivial task
    to actually determine the WEP key if you have zero knowledge about the
    target network, i.e. IP addressing, AND can't readily inject 802.11b
    frames into the target network just because you have a usable
    keystream? Has anyone found differently?

    This paper [1] provides pretty good examples of the attacks. In the "Passive Attack
    to Decrypt Traffic", if you have a known keystream with one known plaintext, then it looks
    like you could determine the plaintext WEP key after you XOR the
    ciphertext and run the results back through RC4 - I don't understand
    why the paper says "Once it is possible to recover the entire plaintext for one of the messages,
    the plaintext for all other messages with the same IV follows directly, since all the pairwise
    XORs are known." But that's just my confusion - if you have the
    keystream (IV + Secret key run through RC4) and you have the original
    plaintext, then why can't you determine the secret key as well?

    Last, what types of traffic or methods are used to determine a
    plaintext? I've seen one method mentioned: inject an ARP packet to the
    AP encrypted with the known keystream. But this seems to be based on
    having information such as IP addressing on the target network, which
    isn't known in this case.

    [1] "Security of the WEP algorithm"
    http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.html

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