WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access)
WPA uses dynamic key encryption, which means the key is constantly changing and makes breaking into a wireless network more difficult than WEP. WPA is considered one of the highest levels of wireless security for your network and is recommended if your devices support this type of encryption. Within WPA, there are two versions of WPA utilizing different processes for authentication:
- For Personal Home Use: Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) is a type of mechanism used to create dynamic key encryption and mutual authentication. TKIP provides the security features that fix the limitations of WEP. Since the keys are always changing, it provides a very high level of security for your network.
- For Business/Enterprise Use: Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is used for message exchange during the authentication process. It utilizes 802.1x Server Technology to authenticate users via a RADIUS server (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service). This provides industrial strength security for your network, but requires a RADIUS server.
WPA2 is the second generation of WPA, and is currently available in all Linksys (WRT54) series routers. WPA2 was not formed to address any limitations in WPA, and is backwards compatible with products that support WPA. The main difference between the original WPA and WPA2 is that WPA2 requires Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for encryption of data, while the original WPA uses TKIP (see above). AES provides enough security to meet the high level standards of many federal government agencies. Like the original WPA, WPA2 will support both an enterprise and home version.