[defledermaus]

It seems apple has a nonstandard way of making wep keys from a password, and I don't have access to the router to find out the key. Can someone with an airport base station translate a password for me?

[ghporter]

First off, WEP is a Bad Thing®. WEP is almost worse than useless because it can be almost trivially broken, and that is because of problems IN THE ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM ITSELF. Very, very bad indeed.

WPA (WiFi Protected Access) on the other hand is very strong; its encryption algorithm has not been broken to date (and it's not likely to be, either) and the only expoloit against it that does anything is actually against the industry-wide standard passphrase algorithm (so use GOOD passphrases and you're golden).

OK, so you are saying you have a Mac password, but not a base station to give you the hex password, right? If that's true, it only takes a little bit of skull sweat to figure out the hex key. Each ASCII character in the password converts directly to a two-hex digit value. Look 'em up, write 'em out in order, and then enter 'em in order. Read the last paragraph in this Apple knowledgebase article for some more explanation. Here's an ASCII table to use to look up the characters.

Now you can do it all by yourself, and the password/key for your network stays as secure as it gets (not much for WEP, but at least it's something).

[defledermaus]

Correct, I have a plaintext password given to me by my landlord. They all use macs and it "just works" for them. Asking for the hex equivalent just caused confusion, so I have to either figure it out myself or wait for their family member who set it up for them to come by.

From that link it seems that if the password were 5 or 13 ascii characters, it would translate directly into hex, but the password I was given is 6. Truncating it to 5 and then converting doesn't work, and of course the windows utilities for my wireless adapter don't produce the right keys either.

I'm not terribly concerned about the network being hacked; like you said, if someone wanted in they would be in by now. I was just hoping someone with a base station could help me out.

[sonam]

Try this : MacASCII Display 1.3

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14150

When you're programming, sometimes you need to know what the ASCII code for a letter is. Sure, you can look it up on a table somewhere, but those tables often don't include the extended set for Macs. So Run MacASCII Display, press the key or key combination (like "option-7" or somesuch), see the character, and see the ASCII code for it--in decimal, hexadecimal, and binary. That's it!

[Macola]

Or WEP Key Maker

[defledermaus]

Problem solved, someone on another forum translated the password for me.

Those programs wouldn't help me out because I am trying to connect from a windows machine. If I had a mac, the passphrase would be enough. Thanks for the suggestions anyways.