<William P.N. Smith> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> "John Steele" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>>The program is free and can be found at
>>http://soroban.co.uk/wepkeygen.htm.
>
> I'm sure this is a wonderful program, but you really shouldn't trust
> anyone else to make up your 'random' numbers for you. I've got a pair
> of hex dice I use, but you could flip coins just as easily.
>
The program is meant to make it easy to create a secure WPA (or WEP) key and
automatically copy it to the clipboard. If you use a manual method then you
have to type in all the values. You may also have to eliminate any values
that are not in the acceptable range (my program eliminates the non printing
characters for the WPA passphrase) and then convert them from hex to the
character value. The router I tested it with did not accept ASCII characters
and needed a passphrase. It is your choice of course.
Security is controlled paranoia. There is always a cost whether this is
financial or time. If your fear is that there are "back door" keys generated
by my program then this is not the case. I am quite prepared to release the
Visual Basic .NET source code if that will reassure you. You can easily
verify that it generates a different value every time it is run. How many
backdoor keys could I have included? How much patience do you have to test
it?
The program uses Microsoft Cryptographic services to generate an array of
random numbers which are used to derive the displayed key values.
John Steele
Soroban Systems Ltd
www.soroban.co.uk