Despite all of the improvements, public demonstrations still show that WPA is vulnerable to intrusion. Said to be the answer to the major vulnerabilities of the WEP standard, WPA includes the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to increase cryptographic strength from RC4, and it also includes message integrity checks to determine if packets passed through the network have been altered. It became available in 2003, just a year before WEP was deprecated. WPAĪlso known as Wi-Fi Protected Access, WPA is a security protocol and security certification program that is supposed to an answer to WEP’s major weaknesses found by researchers. This includes a restriction of only 64-bit encryption (lifted) and easy-to-crack passwords. In 2004, however, WEP was finally deprecated due to numerous security flaws. WEP was even ratified as the Wi-Fi security standard in 1999. It was the most often used security measure at one time, and it is the default security choice presented by most routers in their configurations.
WEP uses RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4), a stream cipher algorithm that is intended to encrypt data. It is a security algorithm meant to provide data confidentiality similar to that of a wired local network, hence its name. Definitions The basic WEP encryption: RC4 keystream encrypting plain text WEPĪlso known as Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP was part of the original 802.11 (Wireless Local Area Network) standard in 1997.