Wi-Fi Protected Access(WPA/WPA2)

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) are two security protocols and security certification programs developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks. The Alliance defined these in response to serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy).[1]

The WPA protocol implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard. The Wi-Fi Alliance intended WPA as an intermediate measure to take the place of WEP pending the preparation of 802.11i. Specifically, the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), was brought into WPA. TKIP encryption replaces WEP's small 40-bit encryption key that must be manually entered on wireless access points and devices and does not change. TKIP is a 128-bit per-packet key, meaning that it dynamically generates a new key for each packet and thus prevents collisions.[2] TKIP could be implemented on pre-WPA wireless network interface cards that began shipping as far back as 1999 through firmware upgrades. However, since the changes required in the wireless access points (APs) were more extensive than those needed on the network cards, most pre-2003 APs could not be upgraded to support WPA with TKIP. Researchers have since discovered a flaw in TKIP that relied on older weaknesses to retrieve the keystream from short packets to use for re-injection and spoofing.[3]

WPA also includes a Message Integrity Check. This is designed to prevent an attacker from capturing, altering and/or resending data packets. This replaces the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) that was used and implemented by the WEP standard. CRC's main flaw was that it did not provide a sufficiently strong data integrity guarantee for the packets it handled. MIC solved these problems. MIC uses an algorithm to check the integrity of the packets, and if it does not equal, it drops the packet.[4]

The later WPA2 certification mark indicates compliance with the full IEEE 802.11i standard. This advanced protocol will not work with some older network cards.

 

 

A high-level overview of WPA terminology

On a high level, different WPA versions and protection mechanisms can be distinguished. A distinction can be made based on the (chronological) version of WPA, the target end-user (based on the simplicity of the authentication key distribution), and the encryption protocol used.

Version
WPA: Initial WPA version, to supply enhanced security over the older WEP protocol.
WPA2: Also known as IEEE 802.11i-2004. Successor of WPA, and replaces the TKIP encryption protocol with CCMP to provide additional security. Mandatory for Wifi-certified devices since 2006.

Target users (authentication key distribution)
WPA-Personal: Also referred to as WPA-PSK (Pre-shared key) mode. Is designed for home and small office networks and doesn't require an authentication server. Each wireless network device authenticates with the access point using the same 256-bit key.
WPA-Enterprise: Also referred to as WPA-802.1x mode, and sometimes just WPA (as opposed to WPA-PSK). Is designed for enterprise networks, and requires a RADIUS authentication server. This requires a more complicated setup, but provides additional security (e.g. protection against dictionary attacks). An Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is used for authentication, which comes in different flavors (for example EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-SIM).

Note that WPA-Personal and WPA-Enterprise are both applicable to WPA and WPA2.

Encryption protocol
TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol): A 128-bit per-packet key is used, meaning that it dynamically generates a new key for each packet. Used by WPA.
CCMP: An AES-based encryption mechanism that is stronger than TKIP. Sometimes referred to as AES instead of CCMP. Used by WPA2.

So at current, the router or access point of a typical home user would support WPA in WPA-PSK mode with TKIP encryption. As routers are upgraded, they will support WPA2 in WPA-PSK mode using CCMP encryption.