Wireless networks to get more secure

The next version of the Wi-Fi Protected Access standard will meet government requirements for secure wireless networks, an industry executive said this week. Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, said WPA 2, which will be certified in September, will incorporate AES encryption and be compliant with FIPS 140-2 security measures. It will also comply with the Defense Department’s recently released wireless policy, which requires encryption of all data that is wirelessly transmitted.

WPA 2 is the functional equivalent of the new 802.11i wireless standard, which comes out in June. The first version of WPA, a subset of 802.11i, came out last June to supersede the much-maligned wired equivalency privacy (WEP) standard, which critics said was vulnerable to hacking. There are currently more than 300 Wi-Fi devices that incorporate WPA security.

Hanzlik said WPA 2 will be backwards compatible with Wi-Fi devices running first-generation WPA security. However, current Wi-Fi devices will not be software upgradeable to the new standard. Because WPA 2 includes stronger encryption than WPA, Wi-Fi-compliant devices will require an additional chip in order to perform the encryption/decryption functions.

Read Full Story