It gets worse But wait, it gets worse! All the 802.11 cards we checked reset their IV counter to 0 every time they were activated, and incremented by 1 for each packet transmitted. This means that low IV values get reused at the beginning of every wireless session. Also, both directions (laptop->base and base->laptop) usually use the same secret k, and often many different people use the same k. So you can find collisions between packets sent by different people! This makes collisions much more common.