WPA plugs holes in WEP

摘要

The wireless LAN industry's first crack at security―802.11 Wired Equivalent Privacy―has been discredited and rightly so. WEP is so easy to break that it's like having a plastic lock on your office door. Although WEP can keep casual snoopers from accessing a wireless LAN, companies need and can do much better. Effective wireless LAN security solutions, such as Cisco's Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP), have been in use over the past year, but they provide limited interoperability In most cases, client radio cards and access points must be from the same vendor, something that doesn't fare very well in public hot spots and many companies that don't enforce a standard desktop. Late last year, the Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) Alliance announced Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), a standards-based security mechanism that eliminates most 802.11 security issues.