WEP Encryption Mechanism

A.

WEP, which stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, is a security protocol used to protect wireless networks. It was introduced as the first security protocol for Wi-Fi networks, but it is now considered obsolete and insecure due to several vulnerabilities that have been discovered.

WEP uses RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) encryption mechanism to encrypt data. RC4 is a stream cipher, which means that it encrypts data one byte at a time. It uses a secret key to generate a stream of pseudo-random bytes, which are then XORed with the plaintext to produce ciphertext.

RC4 was initially developed by RSA Security in 1987, and it was kept as a trade secret until it was leaked in 1994. Despite its vulnerabilities and weaknesses, RC4 remained widely used in various applications, including WEP, until it was officially deprecated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2015.

In summary, the encryption mechanism used in WEP is RC4.