When it comes to regular PCs, WPA is supported by both Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Mac OS X (as well as Windows Vista, naturally). Frankly, you should avoid buying any wireless device that does WPA. Unfortunately, there are still wireless devices being sold today - mostly of the consumer electronics variety - that don’t support WPA. (Although WEP also supports passphrases, it does so only as a way to more easily create static keys, which are usually comprised of the hex characters 0-9 and A-F). And those encryption keys are constantly changed. Using a technology called TKIP (for Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), that passphrase, along with the network SSID, is used to generate unique encryption keys for each wireless client. To encrypt a network with WPA Personal/PSK you provide your router not with an encryption key, but rather with a plain-English passphrase between 8 and 63 characters long. The easiest-to-use and most widely supported version is WPA Personal, sometimes referred to as WPA Pre-Shared Key (PSK). But given that it can be broken increasingly easily with commonly available equipment and software, why continue to use WEP when WPA is a more secure and easy to use alternative?Įven if your router is several years old, it almost certainly supports some form of WPA (and if it doesn’t, upgrading to the latest firmware may fix that). Of course, none of this means that there’s necessarily someone lurking outside your window with the capability or desire to hack your wireless network in the blink of an eye. After spending less than a minute intercepting data (fewer than 100,000 packets in all) they were able to compromise a WEP key in just three seconds, and they did it using a system equipped with a mere 1.7 GHz Pentium M CPU, which is less powerful than the processor found in today’s entry-level notebooks. In fact, researchers in the computer science department of a German university recently demonstrated the capability to compromise a WEP-protected network very quickly.
Netgear security wep vs wpa plus#
The process of “cracking” a WEP key used to require that a malicious hacker intercept millions of packets plus a fair amount of time and computing power.īut technology moves fast, and that’s no longer the case. As a result, most people just set up a single key and then continue using it ad infinitum.Ī recent development reinforces how even changing WEP keys frequently is no longer sufficient to protect a WLAN. But few bother to do this because changing WEP keys is inconvenient and time-consuming - it has to be done not just on the router, but on every device that connects to it. This problem used to be something you could mitigate by periodically changing the WEP key (which is why routers generally allow you to store up to four keys). But the fact that packets are encrypted doesn’t prevent them from being intercepted, and due to some esoteric technical flaws it’s entirely possible for an eavesdropper to intercept enough WEP-encrypted packets to eventually deduce what the key is. When you set up a router with a WEP encryption key, that one key is used by every device on your network to encrypt every packet that’s transmitted. WEP’s major weakness is its use of static encryption keys. This week we’ll take a look at why you shouldn’t be using WEP anymore, and why WPA is a better choice. Widespread use of WEP is almost understandable given that to the layperson, the similar abbreviations WEP and WPA don’t convey any meaningful difference between the two security methods (and they may even imply equivalence) Plus, WEP is almost always presented first by the security interface of most broadband routers since WEP comes before WPA both historically and alphabetically).
Although it’s mainly there for backward compatibility with the oldest hardware, if reports and studies are accurate, a significant percentage of WLANs operating today (especially those used in homes) are still using outdated and insecure WEP for their encryption.
WPA has been a mainstream technology for years now, but WEP remains a standard feature on virtually every wireless router on store shelves today. Therefore, it wasn’t long (though at the time it seemed like forever) before a new technology called WPA - Wi-Fi Protected Access - debuted to address many of WEP’s shortcomings. WEP was designed to protect a wireless network from eavesdropping, but it soon became apparent that due to myriad flaws, WEP’s privacy was not at all equivalent to that of a wired network. If reports and studies are accurate, a significant percentage of wireless LANs (especially those used in homes) are still using outdated and insecure WEP for their encryption.īack when the first consumer WLAN hardware hit the streets more than six years ago, they came with a technology called WEP, or Wired Equivalent Privacy.
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