Published: 19 October 2020    Last Updated: 03 July 2023

It’s well known that the WiFi security protocol WEP is broken. It’s been broken for years. However, if we’re writing a series on wireless security we should start at the beginning. Whilst it stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, it hardly lives up to its name. WiFi comes under the IEEE 802.11 family. WEP was part of the original standard and was quickly superseded by WPA – WiFi Protected Access.

WEP can be broken using the aircrack-ng suite. However you will require a compatible wireless card with features such as injection support – the aircrack-ng documentation discusses supported cards. In this article we’ll be using a USB Alfa AWUS036ACH, which inside has a Realtek RTL8812au. To get injection support requires patched drivers, but again they’re available from aircrack: