What are WEP and WPA?

Question

What are WEP and WPA? How do they compare for security/ease of implementation?

Answer 1

Both are encryption methods for wireless communications. You need to use WPA encryption as WEP is the older standard and can now easily be broken (in as little as two minutes).

Answer 2

WEP:

Short for Wired Equivalent Privacy, a security protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) defined in the 802.11b standard. WEP is designed to provide the same level of security as that of a wired LAN. LANs are inherently more secure than WLANs because LANs are somewhat protected by the physicalities of their structure, having some or all part of the network inside a building that can be protected from unauthorized access. WLANs, which are over radio waves, do not have the same physical structure and therefore are more vulnerable to tampering. WEP aims to provide security by encrypting data over radio waves so that it is protected as it is transmitted from one end point to another. However, it has been found that WEP is not as secure as once believed. WEP is used at the two lowest layers of the OSI model - the data link and physical layers; it therefore does not offer end-to-end security.



WPA:

Short for Wi-Fi Protected Access, a Wi-Fi standard that was designed to improve upon the security features of WEP. The technology is designed to work with existing Wi-Fi products that have been enabled with WEP (i.e., as a software upgrade to existing hardware), but the technology includes two improvements over WEP:

* Improved data encryption through the temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP). TKIP scrambles the keys using a hashing algorithm and, by adding an integrity-checking feature, ensures that the keys haven’t been tampered with.
* User authentication, which is generally missing in WEP, through the extensible authentication protocol (EAP). WEP regulates access to a wireless network based on a computer’s hardware-specific MAC address, which isrelatively simple to be sniffed out and stolen. EAP is built on a more secure public-key encryption system to ensure that only authorized network users can access the network.

It should be noted that WPA is an interim standard that will be replaced with the IEEE’s 802.11i standard upon its completion.

Answer 3

Both are wireless key encryption schemes. WPA is more secure, but you need to make up a longer password, like antidisestablishmentarianism.

Answer 4

The best explanation for stuff like this is found on Wikipedia. Bookmark it!

http://www.wikipedia.org