Re: NM and WEP

[Patton Echols <p echols comcast net>]

Sry if this reposts.  Having mail trouble here so trying again.

On 05/31/2007 02:16 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 17:25 +0000, Volker Braun wrote:
>   
> > Your WEP password is wrong. A glaring design flaw of WEP is that it does 
> > not give any feedback on whether the password is correct or not. 
> >     
>
> Right; NM basically has to try to run DHCP and (after 40s) timeout the
> connection attempt, because there's no indication that the key is wrong.
>
>   
Well, the scenario is this:

The A.P. is at a coffee shop that is selected by other folks for 
meetings. They provide "free" access, but use WEP to keep folks from 
parking in their lot, using their connection and not coming in to buy 
coffee. When you buy coffee, they have a stack of slips on the counter 
with the current password. It is not designed for real security, just to 
be enough of a hassle so that people will actually come in the store. 
The point of this background is that the passwords are easy: Like 
"h0t-m0cha" and they are written down, so easy to key in correctly. 
Finally, as I said in the original post, when I boot to WinXP, feed it 
the password, it works just fine.
> Be _sure_ you have the right type of passphrase.  The other flaw in WEP
> is that there are 3 key lengths (40, 104, and 152 bit) and 3 different
> passphrase hashes (hex, ascii, and passphrase).  
Ok, I saw the place to select the hash on the passphrase dialog, but I 
thought it was just looking for eg; a hex passphrase. In which case a 
passphrase with a "t" or "m" would not work. Could I use the example 
above if I switched to hex or ascii?

I don't remember seeing a choice of key length. Is that in the same 
dialog? Or do I change that setting elsewhere. If NM defaults to 104 
bit, I can imagine a failure because the philosophy of what they are 
trying to do is minimal security.
> There's also the Open
> System and Shared Key auth methods.  You must get all of those correct,
> otherwise the connection will not succeed.
>   
And no way to get the AP to tell you the combo it is looking for? How 
does windoze do it then? It seems to work there :-(
> WEP sucks.
>
>   
Yeah, I didn't pick it.