256 bit WEP support

Bar, Eitan eitanb at ti.com
Wed Oct 19 12:17:35 EDT 2005


> I noticed 256 bit WEP is not currently supported by wpa_supplicant.
> 
> Does anyone know if there is any specific reason for this (other than
> the fact that it is not so popular / it's part of 802.11b+)?

I'm not aware of any public specification that defines this kind of use
for WEP. Is such thing available? Is this used in any standard mechanism
or is it just a vendor specific extension?

 [Eitan Bar] As far as I know, 256-bit WEP is supported by
Texas-Instruments chipsets and maybe one or two more vendors. This is
not mentioned in any official standard.

> Has anyone maybe locally implemented this on his/her own or has any
idea
> how difficult it will be to code it myself ?

Would you like to use it with static WEP keys or dynamic (802.1X) (or
both)? It should be quite straightforward to add support for configuring
longer WEP keys. Actually, 128-bit (i.e., 128 secret bits, not the
normal 104 bits) is already supported for static WEP keys. Changing
MAX_WEP_KEY_LEN to 32 should do the sae for 256-bit case. IEEE 802.1X
may need some more changes, but those should be one-liner changes for
key length validation.

[Eitan Bar] I only require support for static WEP keys. So basically
most of the required changes are MAX_WEP_KEY_LEN and probably add some
defines to the configuration parser (to support WPA_CIPHER_WEP_256),
right? That's cool! :)


-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
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