Wireless networks security: Proof of chopchop attack

Abstract

An encryption protocol is the first line of defense against network attacks. The wired equivalent privacy (WEP), used to secure 802.11 based networks, suffers from many weaknesses that were exploited in order to compromise the security of the network, data confidentiality and integrity. An attack named chopchop can decrypt the content of a frame without knowing the encryption key. There has been no theoretical proof of the functionality of the attack. In this paper, we will give a review of the attack and build a mathematical model to prove theoretically that the attack is capable of decrypting messages in WEP enabled wireless networks without requiring the knowledge of the encryption key.