In the case of the WEP key there's no username. Just the key. And it's not quite as secretive a secret as your own personal password. Every user gets their own password, but typically all the users on a wireless LAN would share the same WEP key.
Typically for password authentication you tell the system who you are by giving your username, then you prove it by giving the password. Internally, the system encrypts whatever you type as your password, using some algorithm, and compares it to the encrypted copy of your password that it has stored somewhere.
In the case of your wireless LAN, it doesn't matter who you are; that's not what it's designed to track. Instead, your laptop plugs the WEP key in as a component in an encryption algorithm, and uses it to transmit everything your PC says, in code. On the other end, the router uses the known WEP key to decode the traffic once it gets there, and encrypt the traffic it sends back, which your PC can then decode. The WEP key itself doesn't get passed back and forth at all. But without matching WEP keys, the devices speak only gibberish to each other, and your connection doesn't work.
If you wanted to have authentication of the users, you would have usernames and passwords in addition to the WEP encryption. You could then restrict access to resources, according to who the user is that is asking for it.
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Date: 2005-10-13 04:22 am (UTC)In the case of the WEP key there's no username. Just the key. And it's not quite as secretive a secret as your own personal password. Every user gets their own password, but typically all the users on a wireless LAN would share the same WEP key.
Typically for password authentication you tell the system who you are by giving your username, then you prove it by giving the password. Internally, the system encrypts whatever you type as your password, using some algorithm, and compares it to the encrypted copy of your password that it has stored somewhere.
In the case of your wireless LAN, it doesn't matter who you are; that's not what it's designed to track. Instead, your laptop plugs the WEP key in as a component in an encryption algorithm, and uses it to transmit everything your PC says, in code. On the other end, the router uses the known WEP key to decode the traffic once it gets there, and encrypt the traffic it sends back, which your PC can then decode. The WEP key itself doesn't get passed back and forth at all. But without matching WEP keys, the devices speak only gibberish to each other, and your connection doesn't work.
If you wanted to have authentication of the users, you would have usernames and passwords in addition to the WEP encryption. You could then restrict access to resources, according to who the user is that is asking for it.