Cisco Key Integrity Protocol
Cisco Key Integrity Protocol (CKIP) is a Cisco-proprietary security protocol for encrypting 802.11 media. CKIP improves 802.11 security in infrastructure mode using key permutation, a message integrity check (MIC), and a message sequence number. For this feature to operate correctly, you must enable Aironet information elements (IEs) for the WLAN.
A lightweight access point advertises support for CKIP in beacon and probe response packets by adding an Aironet IE and setting one or both of the CKIP negotiation bits (key permutation and multi-modular hash message integrity check [MMH MIC]). Key permutation is a data encryption technique that uses the basic encryption key and the current initialization vector (IV) to create a new key. MMH MIC prevents bit-flip attacks on encrypted packets by using a hash function to compute message integrity code.
The CKIP settings specified in a WLAN are mandatory for any client attempting to associate. If the WLAN is configured for both CKIP key permutation and MMH MIC, the client must support both. If the WLAN is configured for only one of these features, the client must support only the CKIP feature.
CKIP requires that 5-byte and 13-byte encryption keys be expanded to 16-byte keys. The algorithm to perform key expansion occurs at the access point. The key is appended to itself repeatedly until the length reaches 16 bytes. All lightweight access points support CKIP.
Note |
CKIP is supported for use only with static WEP. It is not supported for use with dynamic WEP. Therefore, a wireless client that is configured to use CKIP with dynamic WEP is unable to associate to a WLAN that is configured for CKIP. We recommend that you use either dynamic WEP without CKIP (which is less secure) or WPA/WPA2 with TKIP or AES (which are more secure). |