Enhancing Message Privacy in WEP

The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol for networks based on 802.11 standards has been shown to have several security flaws. In this paper we have proposed a modification to the existing WEP protocol to make it more secure. We also develop an IV avoidance algorithm that eliminates Initialization Vector (IV) collision problem by assigning unique pattern of IV bits to each node. We achieve Message Privacy by ensuring that the encryption is not breached. The idea is to update the shared secret key frequently based on factors like network traffic and number of transmitted frames. We show that frequent rekeying thwarts all kinds of cryptanalytic attacks on the WEP.