[MLB-WIRELESS] New Protection for 802.11

[Barry Park]

New Protection for 802.11
By Eric Griffith

The non-profit Wi-Fi Alliance, the consortium behind interoperability
standards and testing for 802-11based networks, has announced an official
replacement for the much derided Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) (define)
encryption. The new solution, called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), is a
subset of the still unfinished IEEE (define) 802.11i security specification
and will be usable by both home and enterprise wireless networks.

Why not wait for 802.11i? According to Dennis Eaton, the chairman of the
Wi-Fi Alliance, "[IEEE] Task Group I doing 802.11i is still on a path to be
complete about this time next year with a fully ratified standard, but
that's a little too long. We had to do something sooner."

That something sooner is WPA, which, according to Eaton, will work with the
majority of 802.11-based products out today once they've gone through a
firmware/software upgrade. WPA is forward compatible with 802.11i. By the
time 11i is ratified around September of next year, expect to see a WPA
version 2.0 with full 802.11i support. Eventually, the Alliance expects to
require Wi-Fi products to shop with WPA turned on as a default.

More at http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article.php/1491771



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