Complete Communications Engineering

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is specified by IEEE 802.11 for encryption and authentication. The standard describes WEP as having two main parts. The first being the Authentication part the second being the Encryption part. The goals of WEP are:

Figure 1 shows an example of WEP authentication:

Example WEP Authentication

The encryption process used by WEP is Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4). There is also a Integrity algorithm CRC-32 is used on the plaintext to create the Integrity Check Value (ICV) used to protect from tampering or unauthorized data modification. Figure 2 shows the encryption algorithm and Figure 3 shows the decryption algorithm.

WEP Encryption

WEP Decryption