WPA

ALSO CALLED: Wireless Encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Access
DEFINITION: Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a security standard for users of computers equipped with Wi-Fi wireless connection. It is an improvement on and is expected to replace the original Wi-Fi security standard, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). WPA provides more sophisticated data encryption than WEP and also provides user authentication (WEP's user authentication is considered insufficient). WEP is still  … 
Definition continues below.

WPA DEFINITION (continued): …  considered useful for the casual home user, but insufficient for the corporate environment where the large flow of messages can enable eavesdroppers to discover encryption keys more quickly.WPA's encryption method is the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP adddresses the weaknesses of WEP by including a per-packet mixing function, a message integrity check, an extended initialization vector, and a re-keying mechanism. WPA provides "strong" user authentication based on 802.1x and the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). WPA depends on a central authentication server such as RADIUS … 
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