May 3rd, 2008

There are literally millions of older Wi-Fi equipment installations that cannot benefit from the newer WPA wireless protection encryption algorithms. Primarily
because the equipment manufacturers have abandoned the equipment and no longer provide updated drivers / firmware upgrades.

Some manufacturers build what are known as ‘passphrase generators’ into their equipment. This basically allows the user to enter an easily remembered phrase and the equipment generates the WEP key based upon an algorithm built into the equipment… and there lies the rub.

Every manufacturer seems to do it a bit differently, if they do it at all. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of standard toward implementing WEP. This creates lots of problems when you are trying to connect devices from various manufacturers because the results from their built in passphrase generators are different across devices.

With the WEP Key Generator Utility, you can generate keys based on a passphrase that is compatible with all wireless systems because all wireless network systems must support hexadecimal based keys.

Instead of using the passphrase generator that is built into the router, or your wireless card on your laptop or PDA, you use the WEP Key Generator utility to generate the WEP keys and manually enter them into your wireless router settings and wireless network adapters.

As you can imagine, this greatly simplifies the implementation of equipment from different manufacturers. Now you can easily use Orinoco, Netgear, and D-Link wireless cards with a Linksys, SMC or Belkin router / switch and not have to worry that one manufacturer uses ASCII based WEP keys and the other doesn’t support it. You are not limited in your choice of equipment by brand.

Not only do we support creating a key with a passphrase, we also have created a way to generate WEP keys based upon any particular file on your computer.

WEP Key Generator

To generate a random WEP key, select the bit key length to generate and press the corresponding button; the ASCII or HEX key can then be copied to your clipboard manually or via the copy to clipboard button to the right of the generated key text field.

You can also generate a custom WEP key based on your own pass phrase or other input.

A good primer on WEP key setup and terms is located here.

NOTES:

- If your product vendor requests 40-bit keys, use the 64-bit key
- If your product vendor requests 104-bit keys, use the 128-bit key
- Apple users can enter HEX keys into their AirPort setup by prefixing the generated string with a”$” symbol
(i.e. if the generated HEX code is 6b5e454532 then you would enter $6b5e454532 into your configuration)

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Posted in Mobile Software |

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