Wired Equivalent Privacy, better known as WEP, has been one of the security industry's laughingstocks for years. However, a fix is in the works—again. Still, this time, the results look promising.

While the WEP encryption standard is installed in zillions of Wi-Fi devices out on the market, it's been common knowledge that cracking keys and breaking WEP encryption is not all that difficult. There's even been a growing trade in tools to help you do this, not that I would approve of such things. What's worse, the problems are at the protocol level, not in the implementations, meaning that WEP has been just plain broken.

The good news is that after some fits and starts, the standards and industry people in the Wi-Fi Alliance finally agreed on a solution, and so far nobody's come up with a serious flaw in it.

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