Appendix A Wireless LANs

WPA and WPA2

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a subset of the IEEE 802.11i standard. WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) is a wireless security standard that defines stronger encryption, authentication and key management than WPA.

Key differences between WPA or WPA2 and WEP are improved data encryption and user authentication.

If both an AP and the wireless clients support WPA2 and you have an external RADIUS server, use WPA2 for stronger data encryption. If you don't have an external RADIUS server, you should use WPA2-PSK (WPA2-Pre-Shared Key) that only requires a single (identical) password entered into each access point, wireless gateway and wireless client. As long as the passwords match, a wireless client will be granted access to a WLAN.

If the AP or the wireless clients do not support WPA2, just use WPA or WPA-PSK depending on whether you have an external RADIUS server or not.

Select WEP only when the AP and/or wireless clients do not support WPA or WPA2. WEP is less secure than WPA or WPA2.

Encryption

Both WPA and WPA2 improve data encryption by using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), Message Integrity Check (MIC) and IEEE 802.1x. WPA and WPA2 use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in the Counter mode with Cipher block chaining Message authentication code Protocol (CCMP) to offer stronger encryption than TKIP.

TKIP uses 128-bit keys that are dynamically generated and distributed by the authentication server. AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a block cipher that uses a 256-bit mathematical algorithm called Rijndael. They both include a per- packet key mixing function, a Message Integrity Check (MIC) named Michael, an extended initialization vector (IV) with sequencing rules, and a re-keying mechanism.

WPA and WPA2 regularly change and rotate the encryption keys so that the same encryption key is never used twice.

The RADIUS server distributes a Pairwise Master Key (PMK) key to the AP that then sets up a key hierarchy and management system, using the PMK to dynamically generate unique data encryption keys to encrypt every data packet that is wirelessly communicated between the AP and the wireless clients. This all happens in the background automatically.

 

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NWA-3160 Series User’s Guide