Which legacy wireless protection mechanism is considered inherently flawed by standards bodies?

• A. TKIP
• B. WEP
• C. WPA2
• D. WPA3

Answer: (B)

WEP is inherently flawed because its design combines a stream cipher (RC4) with a very small initialization vector (IV) of 24 bits. In real networks, many packets are sent, so IVs quickly repeat, causing the same keystream to be used more than once. When an attacker can observe enough encrypted packets, these IV repetitions let them perform practical attacks to recover the secret key and decrypt traffic, breaking confidentiality.

Beyond this, WEP’s integrity protection is weak. It uses a CRC-32 as a message integrity check, which is not cryptographically secure and provides no proper authentication. That means a attacker can tamper with data or craft new frames and not be reliably detected, undermining data integrity and authenticity.

Because of these fundamental weaknesses, standards bodies have deemed WEP unreliable and deprecated it in favor of more secure protections like TKIP and, later, AES-based WPA2 and WPA3.