What are the advantages and disadvantages of Shared Key Authentication?
A. In Shared Key Authentication, the client and the AP exchange the challenge text (clear text) and the encrypted challenge. Therefore, this type of authentication is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack. A hacker can listen to the unencrypted challenge and the encrypted challenge, and extract the WEP key (shared key) from this information. When a hacker knows the WEP key, the whole authentication mechanism is compromised and the hacker can access the WLAN network. This is the major disadvantage with Shared Key Authentication.
