[TriLUG] WEP insecure? What else?

[Jim Thompson]

Hi all,

I've seen several posts to the effect of "never use WEP because it's
incredibly easy to break". To test this, I've been using Airsnort to
monitor my own 128-WEP network at home. I've been capturing packets
for awhile now and have only one "interesting" packet.  This link:

http://www.knoppix-std.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1714

seems to say similar things: guy captures millions of packets and gets
only one "interesting" one. Has anyone actually *used* Airsnort or
some other sniffing tool to successfully crack a 128bit WEP-enabled
wireless link before (and not just "I've heard it's really easy to
kr4ck LOL")? How long is a practical window on a home connection
before enough "interesting" packets get collected (even assuming that
the network is relatively busy instead of idle most of the time)? Is
the risk of a  neighbor cracking your WEP really practical? Certainly,
if it takes days or weeks to get enough packets, that sort of rules
out the casual wardriver, right?

I'm looking into other solutions besides WEP, but linux is a stumbling
block right now. I've got a Cisco aironet 340 wireless card on a
Gentoo box connecting to a Linksys wireless "router". The Linksys
allows for WAP instead of WEP, but in searching for a way to get my
Aironet to work with WAP under Linux, I've found that it looks like a
pretty thorny deal to get WAP to actually work. My current project is
to put a *BSD box in between the wireless router and the internet/LAN
access, but that's kind of an end-run around getting Linux wireless to
be more secure.

Jim