This key generator was written by Chris Elliott, Warewolf Labs. It was originally written and distributed in 2001, but much has changed since then and you would be wise to read the comments on the Warewolf Labs site (here) and the article about WEP security at Security Focus before relying blindly on the credibility of WEP-based security.

That said, WEP is still an important tool, and this WEP key generator will still be of use to many people.

To generate a random WEP key, select the bit key length to generate and press the corresponding button; the ASCII or HEX key can then be copied to your clipboard manually or via the "copy to clipboard" button to the right of the Generated Key text fields. Note that in order to be as platform-independent as possible, characters used for generation of these keys are limited to a subset of the basic ASCII code table (95 elements, including the letters "a" to "z", "A" to "Z", and most punctuation and other standard symbols; at the time that this original program was written, support for Unicode was not widely present among the installed base of consumer operating systems to allow for the inclusion of extended characters which would increase the strength of WEP keys generated with this program).

You can also generate a custom WEP key based on your own pass phrase or other input.  IMPORTANT: this function simply converts your supplied input from ASCII to HEX form; it does not apply any other transformations or algorithms upon it, therefore your custom key will only be as strong as your source material.

A good primer on WEP key setup and terms is located here.

• If your product vendor requests 40-bit keys, use the 64-bit key
• If your product vendor requests 104-bit keys, use the 128-bit key
• Apple users can enter HEX keys into their AirPort setup by prefixing the generated string with a"$" symbol (i.e. if the generated HEX code is 6b5e454532 then you would enter $6b5e454532 into your configuration)

Click the required button to generate the key, which will be shown at the foot of the page.

Here you can create a key based on any phrase of your choosing. Remember that working out your key is only as difficult as working out the phrase you use here, so do not use something obvious.

Click the "generate custom key" button to generate the key, which will be shown at the foot of the page.

NOTE: 5/13/16/29 characters are needed for 64/128/152/256-bit WEP respectively