Wireless security & privacy

Internet enabled wireless devices continue to proliferate and are expected to surpass traditional Internet clients in the near future. This has opened up new exciting opportunities in the mobile e-commerce market. Data security and privacy is the major concern in the current generation of "wireless Web" offerings. The physical security of wireless devices, Bluetooth security, WAP security, higher-level security protocols like SSL are known. In this article, the WEP algorithm is discussed. The IEEE 802.11 standard defines WEP i.e., wired equivalent privacy. WEP is designed to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. 802.11 designed WEP is not able to achieve this goal. But WEP could achieve this by migrating from 40 bit to 104 or 128 bit RC4 keys. Privacy cannot be obtained with WEP encapsulation just by increasing key size. Even if key size is 1 into 1000 bit it does not affect the security of WEP encapsulation or if any other stream cipher which replaces RC4.