Dan Boneh's Cryptography lecture - problem with 802.11b I am going through Dan Boneh's Cyprography lectures on Coursera.

In Lecture 6
https://class.coursera.org/crypto-010/lecture/6  

At 7:30 minutes, he discusses the problems with 802.11b design.
I understand his critique. However, he then moves on to what would be better design at 12:55 minutes.  

He says that they could use a PRG to generate a very long key from the key and then use segments of the PRG(K) to encrypt each frame.  

Even if you generate a very long PRG(K), considering the amount of traffic exchanged, wouldn't key still get repeated every few hours or so - i.e. you come to the end of the PRG(K), you have to start reusing first segment of PRG(K) again - which will lead to the key reuse problem. So what am I missing here?
...wouldn't key still get repeated every few hours or so - i.e. you come to the end of the PRG(K)...


This is where you are mistaken. Modern cryptographic PRGs simply do no repeat within any conceivable time frame. That is, starting from a seed, a well-constructed PRG (and this is true even when they are not so well constructed, like RC4) will simply never "come to an end" within our life time. You will have to run it for such a long time that the universe will probably have grown dark before you see it cycling back. Hence, for all practical purposes, cryptographic PRGs never repeat.

However, as noted in the video, this only holds true starting from some initial seed which is held fixed throughout the process. Note that the problem with WEP was that they reused the input (i.e. the seed) to the PRG, it was not because the output cycled around! Once you reuse the seed to a PRG then you will of course see the same output stream.