Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)

The Wi-Fi Alliance introduced an interoperable security protocol known a Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), based on draft 3 of the IEEE 802.11i standard in April 2003. The Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) technologies were designed to address the weaknesses associated with Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) was meant to replace for Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) without additional hardware or replacement hardware.

The original Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) was implemented in such a way that it can communicate with older wireless hardware. The WPA2 implements the full standard and is not compatible with older hardware.

WPA uses Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) based on the RC4 cipher, which dynamically changes keys. Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) was designed by the IEEE 802.11i task group and the Wi-Fi Alliance as a solution to replace WEP without requiring the replacement of legacy hardware. WPA also support for Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), Extensible Authentication Protocol Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS), Extensible Authentication Protocol-Tunneled Transport Layer Security (EAP-TTLS), or Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP).