Which of the following is a drawback to using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)?

Question

Options

• AWireless network overhead is excessive.
• BSymmetric-key encryption is susceptible to cracking.
• CThe number of devices that can communicate using WEP is limited.
• DEncryption and decryption speeds are slower compared to other protocols.

• A
  8% (2)
• B
  88% (21)
• D
  4% (1)

Explanation

WEP's fatal flaw is its use of RC4, a symmetric-key stream cipher, combined with a static, short (40-bit or 104-bit) key and a weak 24-bit Initialization Vector (IV) that frequently repeats - making it trivially crackable with tools like Aircrack-ng in minutes, even by novice attackers. This vulnerability is so severe that WEP was deprecated by the IEEE in 2004.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A - WEP doesn't impose excessive overhead; it was designed to be lightweight for resource-constrained hardware of the late 1990s.
• C - WEP imposes no meaningful limit on the number of communicating devices.
• D - WEP's RC4 cipher is actually quite fast; encryption/decryption speed was never the complaint.

Memory tip: Think "WEP = Weak Encryption Protocol." The key word in the correct answer is symmetric - both sides share the same static key, so if an attacker captures enough traffic to reverse-engineer that one key, the entire network is compromised. Contrast this with WPA2/WPA3, which use dynamic key generation (TKIP/CCMP) to mitigate this exact problem.

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