Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Special > Miscellaneous > Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) NeedToKnow - Part II

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) NeedToKnow - Part II

09:11 - Wednesday 25 June 2003 by THG Reporting Team

1. Introduction
2. User Authentication
3. Upgrading - 11g jumps to the head of the line
4. Upgrading - 11b and other stuff
5. BYO supplicant
6. WPA in action - AP "SOHO"
7. WPA in action - AP "Enterprise"

8. WPA in action - Client "SOHO" mode
9. WPA in action - Client "Enterprise" mode
10. WPA in action - Broadcom Performance
11. WPA in action - Intersil 11g Performance
12. WPA in action - Mix 'n Match
13. Failed experiments
14. Conclusions

When we last left WPA (in our November 2002 WPA - Wireless Security for the rest of us NeedToKnow) it was but a gleam in the eye of the Wi-Fi Alliance and a hardy band of brave souls. They had decided to stop waiting for the IEEE Task Group i to finish its work, take a subset of the technologies the Task Group was working on and get them to market as soon as possible.

At April's Networld+Interop show in Las Vegas, the Wi-Fi Alliance proudly entire portion of its website to promoting and explaining WPA, and it's a decent resource if you need some help in wrapping your mind around this new wireless security feature-set.

A handy document there is a presentation they did for us slow-on-the-uptake Media types at last April's Networld+Interop kickoff session. It gives a summary of both the background of WPA and the elements that now go into it.

One of the simple explanatory devices they used was this equation for WPA: