WLAN industry launched a new Wi-Fi security plan

Wireless LAN manufacturers plan to beef up security for their products with harder-to-break keys and an industrywide authentication plan targeted at enterprise users through a program called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

The effort was announced today by the Wi-Fi Alliance industry trade group.

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Dennis Eaton, chairman of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Wi-Fi Alliance, said vendors should start rolling out certified products featuring key components of WPA in February. WPA provides enterprises with a built-in mechanism to authenticate the identity of users based on the Extensible Authentication Protocol, which runs on Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service network servers.

WPA also replaces the static encryption keys incorporated into the current Wi-Fi Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP) with harder-to-crack dynamic keys through use of the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), part of the draft Institute for Electrical and Electronics 802.i standard expected to be approved in 2004.

In addition, WPA includes a message integrity check-sum called “Michael” that will help network administrators determine whether or not an unauthorized user has tried to intercept and decode TKIP keys.

Home Wi-Fi users will be able to take advantage of the TKIP portion of WPA, but not the authentication portion, Eaton said.

John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said WPA marks industrywide acceptance of the Safe Secure Networks project developed by industry heavyweights such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. this spring to improve wireless LAN security.