The Wi-Fi security protocol WEP should not be relied on to protect sensitive material, according to three German security researchers who have discovered a faster way to crack it. They plan to demonstrate their findings at a security conference in Hamburg this weekend.

Mathematicians showed as long ago as 2001 that the RC4 key scheduling algorithm underlying the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol was flawed, but attacks on it required the interception of around 4 million packets of data in order to calculate the full WEP security key. Further flaws found in the algorithm have brought the time taken to find the key down to a matter of minutes, but that's not necessarily fast enough to break into systems that change their security keys every five minutes.

Now it takes just 3 seconds to extract a 104-bit WEP key from intercepted data using a 1.7GHz Pentium M processor. The necessary data can be captured in less than a minute, and the attack requires so much less computing power than previous attacks that it could even be performed in real time by someone walking through an office.

Anyone using Wi-Fi to transmit data they want to keep private, whether it's banking details or just e-mail, should consider switching from WEP to a more robust encryption protocol, the researchers said.

"We think this can even be done with some PDAs or mobile phones, if they are equipped with wireless LAN hardware," said Erik Tews, a researcher in the computer science department at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany.

Tews, along with colleagues Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Andrei Pyshkin, published a paper about the attack showing that their method needs far less data to find a key than previous attacks: just 40,000 packets are needed for a 50 percent chance of success, while 85,000 packets give a 95 percent chance of success, they said.

Although stronger encryption methods have come along since the first flaws in WEP were discovered over six years ago, the new attack is still relevant, the researchers said. Many networks still rely on WEP for security: 59% of the 15,000 Wi-Fi networks surveyed in a large German city in September 2006 used it, with only 18 percent using the newer WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) protocol to encrypt traffic. A survey of 490 networks in a smaller German city last month found 46% still using WEP, and 27% using WPA. In both surveys, over a fifth of networks used no encryption at all, the researchers said in their paper.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.