WPA
Wireless Protected
Access, or Wi-Fi Protected Access is a security solution adopted by the Wi-Fi Alliance that
adds authentication to WEP's basic encryption. For authentication, WPA specifies IEEE 802.1x
authentication with Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). For encryption, WPA uses the
Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) mechanism, which shares a starting key between
devices, and then changes their encryption key for every packet. Certificate Authentication
(CA) can also be used. Also part of the encryption mechanism are 802.1x for dynamic key
distribution and Message Integrity Check (MIC) a.k.a. Michael.
WPA requires that all
computers and devices have WPA software.