Wireless Security

Wired Equivalence Privacy (WEP): An encryption technology that provides a very low level of privacy.

• WEP should really only be seen as being as safe as sending unencrypted data over a wired connection
• only uses 40 bits for encryption keys
• quickly replaced with WPA…

The # of bits in an encryption key corresponds to how secure it is

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA): A security program that uses a 128-bit key to protect wireless computer networks, which makes it more difficult to crack than WEP

• WPA2 - uses a 256-bit key, even harder to crack

MAC filtering: Access points are configured to only allow for connections from a specific set of MAC addresses belonging to devices you trust