IT managers fed up with the security flaws in the wired equivalent privacy standard are wondering when to begin upgrading their enterprise 802.11 wireless LANs with Wi-Fi Protected Access. However, although there is much to be gained by moving to the . . .
IT managers fed up with the security flaws in the wired equivalent privacy standard are wondering when to begin upgrading their enterprise 802.11 wireless LANs with Wi-Fi Protected Access. However, although there is much to be gained by moving to the latest security standard from the Wi-Fi Alliance, there are many things to consider before making the jump.

Ratified last year by the Wi-Fi Alliance, WPA addresses the security vulnerabilities found in WEP-enabled 802.11 WLANs. For example, WPA-compliant products will include dynamic key generation, as well as an improved RC4 data encryption scheme that uses TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and mandatory 802.1x authentication.

WPA provides a much-enhanced RC4 encryption implementation through TKIP. TKIP makes the data packets more secure and is backward-compatible with WEP, although it also creates performance overhead. WPA also uses a new cryptographic checksum method called Michael that verifies the validity of an 8-byte message integrity code placed within the 802.11 frame to protect against forgery attacks.

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