In article , Jeff Liebermann wrote: :I beg to differ. When this came up in the past, I did a quick check :of online and firmware based ASCII to Hex converters. I found one :that screwed up by adding a null terminator to the Hex string. :Another would truncate at 5 or 13 characters and automagically guess :if it were 64 or 128 bits. All the others converted with a simple :ASCII character to Hex character conversion. One ASCII character :equals two Hex characters. There's only one way to do that. I mean :what could be simpler?
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Linksys WAP11 v.2.6 Version 1.07 firmware Version v1.07, April 16, 2003 release notes
Fix WEP key passphrase generation. Certain passphrase genarates the wrong keys.
I'm not sure if it's the same issue or not, but there was at least one device that took the user passphrase of non-fixed length and ran it through an algorithm (e.g., CRC or MD5 like functions) to generate the
64 bit hex key, to save the user from having to enter stuff in hex. There was, though, a flaw in the initial version that caused it to only be able to generate a subset of the possible octets, with the result that the generated keyspace was
*much* smaller than it should have been. [I suspect that it was indeed Linksys and that the above shows when it was fixed.]