• Registered: 2007-10-30
  • Posts: 28

Topic: Work wireless key is Only 5 digits. Help?

So I brought my chumby into work today but we have an unbearably old Intermec access point that uses a key of only 5 digits. Chumby requires 10 or more and won't even allow me to try the 5. I've tried adding leading zeros and such... no luck.

Obscure, I know... and from what I've found there are many older routers based on this Proximo card that use an RC4 PRNG algorithm. I know with any laptops that come into the office we can just give them the code and they hop right on.

Is there any way to temporarily disable the "must be 10 digits" requirement so I can test this out? Or access the file storage to manually set the wireless key for a device?

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,209

Re: Work wireless key is Only 5 digits. Help?

WEP-40/64 requires a minimum of 10 hexadecimal digits, or 5 bytes.

Since you have 5 characters,what you *might* have is an ASCII password, not a HEX number.  If you have *only* the digits 0-9 or the letters A-F, then this is very likely HEX - otherwise the password is definitely ASCII.  However, it's possible for a password with only valid HEX digits to still be an ASCII password.

The WEP standard does not support ASCII passwords, so each vendor has created their own mapping from ASCII to HEX, some of which are proprietary (most notably Apple).  I think we've seen at least seven *different* methods for conversion and padding out there.

Here's what I'd try - convert the 5 characters to HEX using this table.

For instance, the password "Snarf" would be 536E617266.

If you're convinced that what you have is just a really small HEX password, then I guess you'll need to try padding with other values, such as FF and 1F, and using trailing padding in addition to head padding.  Frankly, 5 HEX digits makes no sense, since it would represent only 2 1/2 bytes - not even a round number of bytes.

Duane's Website

  • Registered: 2007-10-30
  • Posts: 28

Re: Work wireless key is Only 5 digits. Help?

Well done! Works like a charm now. The key was all numeric, so I had tried converting them between hex and dec... but it honestly never occured to me to convert it to ascii and drop in the hex equivilent. Some programmer I am. wink

Thanks again. Saved me the trouble of having to setup a new access point at work... just for my chumby.