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Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks

  • 151 Accesses

Synonyms

The draft IEEE 802.11i standard

Definition

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a security standard designed for wireless networks. WPA implements most of the IEEE 802.11i standard and was an alternative to previous security standard before 802.11i was developed, so it is sometimes referred to as the draft IEEE 802.11i standard.

Historical Background

WPA was developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to provide better security than Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), the previous Wi-Fi security standard. WPA became available in 2003, and it was intended as a transitional measure for the full IEEE 802.11i standard (also referred to as WAP2), which became available in 2004. WAP2 may not work with some older network cards, while WPA can work well with these older network cards. Therefore, WPA and WPA2 are concurrent security standards.

There are typically two versions of WPA based on the differences in target users:

  • WPA-Personal mode, also referred to as WPA-PSK, is designed for home and small...

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References

  • Halvorsen FM, Haugen O, Eian M, Mjølsnes SF (2009) An improved attack on TKIP. In: Nordic conference on secure IT systems. Springer, pp 120–132

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  • Tews E, Beck M (2009) Practical attacks against WEP and WPA. In: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on wireless network security. ACM, pp 79–86

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  • Tsitroulis A, Lampoudis D, Tsekleves E (2014) Exposing WPA2 security protocol vulnerabilities. Int J Inf Comput Secur 6(1):93–107

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  • Vanhoef M, Piessens F (2013) Practical verification of WPA-TKIP vulnerabilities. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSAC symposium on information, computer and communications security. ACM, pp 427–436

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  • Vanhoef M, Piessens F (2017) Key reinstallation attacks: forcing nonce reuse in WPA2. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 1313–1328

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Sheng Zhong

Authors
  1. Sheng Zhong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sheng Zhong .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo , Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Xuemin (Sherman) Shen

  2. Faculty of Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada

    Xiaodong Lin

  3. Dpt.of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Omaha, NE, USA

    Kuan Zhang

Section Editor information

  1. Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, Shanghai, China

    Haojin Zhu

  2. Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, China, Nanjing, China

    Jian Shen

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Zhong, S. (2019). Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). In: Shen, X., Lin, X., Zhang, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32903-1_175-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32903-1_175-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32903-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32903-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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