Having wireless Internet at home or at the office is very convenient and almost a must when you own a Laptop. Who likes all those cables lying around anyways? And with today’s level of technology, setting up your own wireless network is a fairly easy thing to do.
Nevertheless, there are some basics in the world of wifi security that not everybody is familiar with. As a result, proper protection is often not provided.
With this article, we will shed some light on two of the most popular questions: “How should I secure my wireless network?” and “What is the difference between WEP and WPA or TKIP, AES, etc. ?”
First of all, it is important to mention that securing your wifi connection is crucial. Without proper protection you are subject to people not just spying on you and stealing your data but also to neighbors accessing the Internet in your name, putting your reputation at stake and using up your traffic.
When you set up your wireless router, you are given three options: 1) Don’t protect your wifi, 2) Use WEP to encrypt your network, and 3) Use WPA or WPA2 to make sure nobody gets unauthorized access.
As previously mentioned, we can eliminate option 1) as this leaves your connection wide open to anybody close enough to receive your signal.
Option 2) uses WEP to encrypt your network. WEP stands for “Wired Equivalent Privacy” and was introduced in 1997. As you can imagine, a security protocol that was developed more than 10 years ago is extremely outdated and does not provide a reliable level of security. With the right software, your WEP key can be found within less then 10 minutes. The main problem here is that the encryption used to protect your data only has 24bit, which allows the right software to “guess” your password once it has captured enough traffic. The most popular tool to achieve this is called Airmon-ng and is available for the Linux operating system.
Option 3) on the other hand, WPA or “Wi-Fi Prptected Access”, is still considered a secure way to protect your data transfer. While scientists have shown a way to break into WPA secured networks, it still takes a good amount of time to do so and is almost impossible if your password is strong enough. (See our post on How to Choose Secure Passwords?).
WPA was developed as an intermediary solution until the release of its successor WPA2. It uses a technology called TKIP or “Temporal Key Integrity Protocol”, which is still supported by older wireless cards that were designed for WEP. This is why some of the flaws of WEP still apply to WPA.
Finally, with the introduction of WPA2, people can now use standard AES encryption algorithms to protect their data. AES uses a secure algorithm that is as good as impossible to crack, which is why WPA2 is considered the best bet to protect your network. Due to the new technology, however, some older network cards and computers might not be able to connect to WPA2.
To sum up, we’ve established that protecting your network is a must and that you don’t want to go without it. Any router you get nowadays will support the WPA encryption mode which is preferred over the outdated WEP technology, as it provides for a better protection. Finally, If your hardware supports WPA2, the most secure encryption mode, you should definitely make use of it.
We hope that this post was helpful to you. Should you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or send us an email through our Contact page.
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