This is a study of insecurities in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard due to the poor implementation of RC4 in Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption algorithm used in this standard and other implementation specific problems passed on to wireless networks from the traditional wired Local Area Networks (LANs). In addition to the attacks already in use by many I have proposed a new approach based on Genetic Algorithm to improve the speed of cracking the secret key used to encrypt the packets. I have also provided a step-by-step approach to hacking WLANs with a brief description of some of the tools available for each step. For completeness I have included a brief overview of the security provisions to improve the issues described in this paper. To the is a diagram that shows some of the covered topics in this work:


Thesis (attached) was presented at San Francisco State University on 10 May 2004.
Committee:

Prof. H. Shahnasser (Chair)
Prof. T. Cooklev