Connecting to a Wireless Network using WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) for Authentication and Encryption#

WEP can be used for both authentication and privacy with your wireless network. To connect with the network, a client must pass an authentication phase with its WAP. The IEEE 802.11 standard defines two types of WEP authentication: Open System and Shared Key. Because both ways have security flaws with the Shared Key even worse, we recommand the WPA/WPA2 if available.

The network name can be up to 32 characters long. The WEP keymust be either 40 bits long or 104 bits long. This means you will have to give either 5 or 13 characters for the WEP key, or a 10 or 26 digit long hexadecimal value.

There are two ways to configure a WEP network. One is by use of the ifconfig utility, the other is through wpa_supplicant. You can use either of them.

When using ifconfig, the command is "ifconfig if_name ssid the_ssid nwkey the_key". For example: if your interface is ral0, you may run

• ifconfig ral0 ssid "corporate lan" nwkey corpseckey456 up (user chosen 128 bit WEP)

Once you have entered the network name and encryption method, the 802.11 network should be active. This can be verified with the ifconfig utility. In the case of ad-hoc networks, the status will only show active if there is at least one other peer on the (ssid) network.

	ifconfig ral0 
	ral0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 
		ssid "corporate lan" nwkey corpseckey456
		powersave off
		bssid 00:11:22:33:44:55 chan 11
		address: 11:44:88:44:88:44
		media: IEEE802.11 autoselect (OFDM36 mode 11g)
		status: active

Once the network status is active, you can send and receive packets on the wireless link.

When using wpa_supplicant, you need to edit a configuration file to tell the wpa_supplicant what you want to do. . For example, the file contains the following,

 
      	network = {       
		ssid = "corporate lan"			# the wifi network you want to associate to
		key_mgmt= NONE				# NONE is for WEP or none security 
		wep_key0 = "corpseckey456"		# most of the cases you may specify a list from wep_key0 to wep_key3.
							# and use key index to specify which one to be used. 
	}

Then you may run "wpa_supplicant -i ral0 -c your_config_file". By default, the configuration file is /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. Alternatively you may use wpa_cli utility to tell the wpa_supplicant daemon what you want to do. Please refer to the TCP/IP Configuration in a Wireless Network (Client in Infrastructure Mode, or adhoc mode) section for TCP/IP interface configuration to complete your network configuration.