After years of hand-wringing over the lack of effective wireless LAN (WLAN) security, players in the WLAN arena have finally agreed on a security specification that addresses most of the vulnerabilities. At the N+I trade show in late April, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced reference designs from chip set vendors Atheros, Broadcom, and Intersil for the new Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) standard, and products certified for the standard from vendors including Cisco Systems, Intel, and Symbol Technologies.
WPA is a combination of an existing standard for authenticating users or client hardware, called 802.1x, an encryption scheme called the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), and a message integrity-check mechanism called Michael. TKIP, which uses different encryption keys for each session and different 128-bit keys for every single packet transmitted, is a vast improvement over its predecessor WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). WEP used static keys and could be cracked in minutes by anyone using free utilities available on the Web.
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WPA is a combination of an existing standard for authenticating users or client hardware, called 802.1x, an encryption scheme called the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), and a message integrity-check mechanism called Michael. TKIP, which uses different encryption keys for each session and different 128-bit keys for every single packet transmitted, is a vast improvement over its predecessor WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). WEP used static keys and could be cracked in minutes by anyone using free utilities available on the Web.
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