What are WPA and WPA2?
WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access and is a subset of the IEEE 802.11i draft standard intended to replace WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) as the primary means of securing 802.11-base wireless networks. WPA consists of methods to strengthen data encryption (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol [TKIP], message integrity check [MIC], extended initialization vector [IV] with sequencing rules, and a re-keying mechanism) and to provide user authentication. There are actually two authentication mechanisms, one for “enterprise” users using 802.1x and Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), and another for home users using a Pre-Shared Key (PSK) method. WPA2 is the implementation of the full 802.11i standard and adds stronger AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption and a few other improvements to WPA. Both WPA and WPA2 are much more secure than WEP. To use WPA or WPA2, you may need a firmware update for your older Access Point or wireless router, and new driver (and maybe firmware) for eac
