Security-Guards
Courtesy of Matt Woolner

Wireless network security is becoming increasingly important in our lives as all sorts of devices ranging from our computers to our cellphones rely on wireless networks to get things done. Wireless network security is a necessity, but few people understand the necessity of securing your wireless network. Everyone knows it is important to a good network security encryption for your wireless network so that way it makes it harder for outsiders to connect to your network without the appropriate knowledge. WEP encryption and WPA encryption are the two most common wireless network security methods for securing your home network.

WEP Encryption Is Broken?

WEP encryption (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is an algorithm that is used to secure wireless networks. It was introduced in 1999 and was supposed to provide the privacy and wireless security comparative to wired networks. In 2001, several weaknesses of WEP were identified by cryptanalysts, and ended up proving that a WEP connection can be cracked with readily available software in only a matter of minutes. So as of 2004 WEP has been deprecated, because it failed to meet it’s security goals.

There are several problems with WEP encryption, including the management of the keys and the size, the IV is too small, ICV algorithm is inappropriate for security, WEP’s use of RC4 is weak, and authentication messages can be forged easily.

While doing research on this subject matter I found that over 200 people search daily on Google and Yahoo on how to crack WEP devices, the knowledge to do this is readily available on any major search engine. I always knew that WEP encryption wasn’t nearly as good as WPA encryption, but until now, I had no idea it has been deprecated due to its severe weaknesses. Wireless routers still give you the options to use WEP encryption and state nothing about its weaknesses.

WPA Encryption - The Response To WEP’s Failure

WPA encryption, also known as Wi-Fi Protected Access, was a wireless network security standard that was designed to combat the many flaws and weaknesses of the WEP encryption protocol. WPA encryption was designed to work with pre-existing networking products by offering firmware updates to make them compatible. WPA encryption is much more secure than WEP’s failing encryption methods, and offers quite two different kinds of protection, RADIUS or PSK.

Pre-Shared-Key, or PSK, is where WPA encryption uses a user-defined password to initialize temporal key integrity protocol. Since you define a password, it is crackable, but if you pick a good, multi-number and letter password it should be able to keep mostly everyone at bay.

RADIUS is different kind of protection mode for WPA encryption that is mostly for enterprise solutions it involves physically trading keys to gain access, and is practically uncrackable due to this fact.

WPA Encryption Wins Hands-Down

This wasn’t much of a comparison for comparison sakes, but it was an analysis of the two different wireless network security encryption methods available, and a word of warning for those of you still using WEP encryption and thinking your Wi-Fi connection is secure. The key to keeping your home wireless network secure is to use good passwords (no dictionary words, random numbers and letters) for your WPA PSK key and it should make it practically full-proof to any hacker.

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