Your Guide To Wireless

WPA Wi-Fi Encryption Cracked for the First Time

Once thought safe, the WPA standard used by countless wireless routers has been revealed to be vulnerable- but only in theory, for now. Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard that is used to safeguard data on many wireless networks. Researcher Erik Tews was to demonstrate the attack at the PacSec conference in Tokyo in mid-November. Cracking WPA encryption could be exploited to read data being sent from a rou...

Will WPA reduce the performance?

Will encryption such as WPA reduce the performance of my 802.11n connection? Yes, wireless encryption can slow the net data throughput of your wireless connection, but the impact should be only slight and not even noticeable unless you’re comparing detailed throughput measurements. Encryption is a mathematical process that has to be applied to data before it’s transmitted and then again once the data is received. A well-designed encryption feature can achieve this at nearly line rate. But...