What Does Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) Mean?
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a security standard to secure computers connected to a Wi-Fi network. Its purpose is to address serious weaknesses in the previous system, the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard.
Techopedia Explains Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
Wi-Fi Protected Access included a 128-bit “temporary key integrity protocol” (TKIP) which dynamically produces a new key for each data packet; WEP only had a smaller 40-bit encryption key which was fixed and had to be manually entered on wireless access points (APs). TKIP was designed to be used with older WEP devices, with updated firmware. However, researchers did discover a security flow in TKIP concerning weaknesses in retrieving the keystream of data packets; it could only encrypt “short” (128 byte) data packets. This caused TKIP to be replaced with CCMP (sometimes called “AES-CCMP”) encryption protocol in WPA2, which provides additional security.
