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Administrators worried about airlink security and crypto-crackers will soon have an option to banish WEP from their WLANs. The Wi-Fi Alliance recently announced the first batch of products to pass Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) certification, and many vendors plan to ship WPA upgrades this summer.
The trouble with WEP
Because radio networks lack the physical access control inherent to Ethernet, the 802.11 standard created Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) to deter access to wireless traffic. In theory, only stations that possess the same key are supposed to be able to associate with the WLAN's access point and encrypt/decrypt traffic. In practice, WEP fell short of this objective. Attackers who capture enough traffic can use shareware to figure out encryption keys, gaining access to everything sent and received by others. What's worse, weak key values reduce time required for key cracking. Because there was no standard method for key update, cracked keys tend to remain in use, further increasing risk.Why WPA is better
WPA is a Wi-Fi Alliance snapshot of the draft IEEE 802.11i security standard. It includes only those parts that are stable and implementable as firmware upgrades for existing 802.11 products. Improvements include:WPA uses the same encryption engine as WEP, which means that upgrades can be supplied as firmware upgrades instead of new hardware. WPA can also back down to WEP if one endpoint doesn't support these new features.
When will WPA be available?
Proprietary pre-WPA TKIP upgrades have been around for months. Companies with homogenous, single-vendor WLANs can apply those upgrades at any time. But most of us must deal with multi-vendor WLANs. Even if we deploy one vendor's access points, we still may face a hodge-podge of integrated and after-market wireless adapters.If you're in that camp, you'll want to know when certified WPA firmware is going to ship for all products that you use. Certification increases the likelihood of multi-vendor interoperability. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the first products to pass 802.11b WPA certification at the end of April were:
The Wi-Fi Alliance only certifies 802.11b right now, even if products also support pre-standard 802.11g. Standard 802.11g certification testing will start later this year. Several of these are reference designs that your favorite WLAN vendor will use in products that you buy. Consumer products will also undergo testing, and you're no doubt wondering when your vendor will start shipping WPA upgrades. Here's what several said when I asked last week:
No reply was received from another half-dozen vendors that I asked. If your vendor isn't listed here, call tech support and bug them until you get an answer. To learn more about Microsoft's WPA support and the Windows XP patch that you'll need to use WPA, see Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article.
This was first published in June 2003