How long does it typically take to crack WEP today?

• A. Minutes
• B. Hours
• C. Days
• D. Weeks

Answer: (A)

WEP is crackable quickly because its design uses a 24-bit initialization vector that is reused with every packet. This tiny IV space means that, as you collect traffic, IVs collide far more often than you’d expect, and a statistical attack can reveal the RC4 keystream and, with it, the secret key. Modern tools can gather enough IVs and analyze them in minutes, allowing an attacker to recover the WEP key and decrypt subsequent frames almost right away. Once the key is known, the network is effectively open to the attacker, so the time to breach is typically measured in minutes rather than hours or days.

That’s why minutes is the best answer. Hours, days, or weeks would imply a much more resistant scenario, which WEP is not in practice due to its fundamental vulnerability. This is also why WEP has been superseded by WPA/WPA2, which address these weaknesses more robustly.