WEP / WPA / WPA2 Security Protocols explained

About this article:

In this article, we are going to talk about all security protocols present in Wi-Fi routers and we will at-last compare WEP, WPA and WPA2 and secondary supplements of WPA2 i.e. WPA2+AES, WPA2+TKIP, etc and discuss the best security protocol available.

WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy

WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy which is most widely used Wi-Fi security protocol in the world even though its old. This is a function of age, backwards compatible and the fact that it appears first in the protocol selection menus in many router control panels.

WPA - Wi-Fi Protected Access

WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access and it was the Wi-Fi Alliance's direct response and replacement to the increasingly apparent vulnerabilities in WEP standard. WPA was formally adopted in 2003, a year before WEP was officially retired. There are a number of configuration of WPA - we have WPA-PSK i.e. Pre-Shared Key and TKIP - Temporal Key Integrity Protocol and something like AES - Advanced Encryption Standards. We will talk about them in a separate article in future.

WPA2 - WiFi Protected Access II

WPA has, as of 2006 been officially superseded by WPA2. One of the most significant changes between WPA and WPA2 is the mandatory use of AES algorithms and the introduction of CCMP - Counter Cipher Mode with Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol as a replacement for TKIP.

Conclusion: Which is secured? Can they be hacked?

Like WEP, WPA can also be hacked and there have been a proof-of-concept and applied public demonstrations to be vulnerable to intrusions. Interestingly, the process by which WPA is usually breached is not a direct attack on the WPA protocol but on a supplementary system called WPA-WPS i.e. Wi-Fi Protected Setup which was actually designed to make it easy to link devices.

Let's talk about the best security protocol as of now, at the time of writing this article. We have WPA2 + AES standing on top. Here's a complete list of security protocol ranked in terms of security.

• WPA2 + AES
• WPA + AES
• WPA + TKIP / AES
• WPA + TKIP
• WEP
• Open Networks ( No Security )