Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Almost all APs, wireless routers or gateways, and network adapters now
being sold support the newer (and much more secure) WPA protocol. And,
almost any computer with Windows XP or Macintosh OS X will also have
built-in support for WPA. So there are many good reasons to skip WEP
entirely and just go with WPA.
But (there’s often a but in these situations) at times you may need to consider
using WEP encryption. You run into this situation with certain pieces of Wi-Fi
gear because you can’t have “mixed” encryption methods on the same network.
In other words, you can’t have laptop A connected to the Wi-Fi AP using
WPA and laptop B connected using WEP. It’s one security system or the other.
We say earlier in this chapter that almost all PCs support WPA, but the dirty
little secret of the Wi-Fi business is that not all Wi-Fi peripheral devices —
such as wireless print servers, media adapters, and other non-PC devices —
support WPA yet. Before you buy any of these devices, check the product
specs and make sure you see WPA (or even better, WPA2) listed on that long
list of acronyms of supported protocols and features.
If any device on your network doesn’t support WPA, you need to use WEP on
that network. Similarly, if you have a device that doesn’t even support WEP
(an exceedingly rare situation that we’ve only rarely run across), you can’t
even use WEP on that network. We think that having WPA encryption on your
network is darned important, so if you run into this situation, we highly recommend
that you try to find devices that support WPA rather than weaken
your overall network security.
A better way: WPA
Chapter 9: Securing Your Wireless Home Network
If you can use WPA — meaning if your access point or wireless gateway and
all the wireless clients on your network support it — you should enable and
use WPA as the airlink security system on your network. WPA is significantly
more secure than WEP and keeps the bad guys off your network much more
effectively than any implementation of WEP.
Two variants of WPA are available: WPA and WPA2. The major difference
between these two is the cipher, or encryption, system used to encode the
data sent across the wireless network. WPA2 — which is the latest and
most powerful wireless security system — uses a system called Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES), which is pretty much uncrackable by mere mortals.
But even the original WPA version (that’s just WPA to you and us), with
its Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), is much more secure than WEP.
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