WPA

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