So, I've been beating my head against the wall of this issue for several months now, partly because it's a side interest and partly because I suck at programming. I've searched and researched all across the web, but have not had any luck (except one small bit of success; see below), so I thought I might try asking the experts.

What I am trying to do is, as the title suggests, generate a 40/64 bit WEP key from a passphrase, according to the "de facto" standard. (A site such as [http://www.powerdog.com/wepkey.cgi] produces the expected outputs.) I have already written portions of the script that take inputs and write them to a file; one of the inputs would be the passphrase, sanitized to lower case.

For the longest time I had no idea what the defacto standard was, much less how to even go about implementing it. I finally stumbled across a paper (http://www.lava.net/~newsham/wlan/WEP_password_cracker.pdf) that sheds as much light as I've had yet on the issue (page 18 has the relevant bits). Apparently, the passphrase is "mapped to a 32-bit value with XOR," the result of which is then used as the seed for a "linear congruential PRNG (which one of the several PRNGs Python has would fit this description, I don't know), and then from that result several bits of the result are taken. I have no idea how to go about implementing this, since the description is rather vague.

What I need is help in writing the generator in Python, and also in understanding how exactly the key is generated. I'm not much of a programmer, so explanations are appreciated as well.

(Yes, I know that WEP isn't secure.)