R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

WLAN security improves

WPA v2, a better standard for protecting wireless LANs, is on the way

Iain Thomson, IT Week 20 May 2003

The Wi-Fi Alliance last week detailed its plans for new wireless LAN (WLAN) standards for better security and easier access. The organisation also announced that the forthcoming 802.11i security standard will be called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) version 2 when it is finalised.

WPA v2 will offer better wireless security features, including AES encryption, and better authentication and identity management, but is unlikely to be ratified before the end of the year at the earliest, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance.

"By the end of the year, or the beginning of the next, 802.11i will be finalised and will give much stronger security," said Brian Grimm, marketing director at the Wi-Fi Alliance. "We'll be calling it WPA v2 because it is more customer-friendly and we want to avoid confusion with 802.11b/Wi-Fi."

WPA v1 was designed to counter the vulnerabilities in the Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security protocol integrated into all WLAN equipment, and became a certified standard on 29 April. The technology can be installed on existing hardware via firmware upgrades, but any full implementation of WPA v2 will require a hardware upgrade.

The alliance, which certifies interoperability between vendors' products, said testing of the IEEE 802.11g WLAN standard had begun. The 802.11g standard, which provides up to 54Mbit/s of bandwidth over the same 2.4GHz radio frequency spectrum used by 11Mbit/s 802.11b equipment, is expected to be ratified by the IEEE by August. However, products based on the specification have been appearing on the market since the beginning of this year.

The alliance said it had insisted that all hardware using the 802.11g standard must be backwards compatible with 802.11b.

However, Michael Wall of analyst company Frost & Sullivan said that many of the early 802.11g offerings could cause interoperability problems. "I'm concerned that 802.11g products are already shipping [before the standard is ratified]," said Wall. "The people shipping them are working on the best guess of what the final standard will be. They may be close to what the final standard ends up as, but there's the potential for major interoperability problems."

Recent figures from research company Dell'Oro Group suggest that many enterprises do not share these concerns. Dell'Oro estimates that worldwide sales of WLAN equipment rose six percent to 4.8 million units in the first quarter of 2003 compared with the previous quarter, with 802.11g equipment accounting for 17 percent of all shipments.

Progress is also being made on a revised version of the 802.11a standard, 802.11h, which is scheduled to be ratified by the IEEE body in July.

Like 802.11a it will support 54Mbit/s communications in the 5GHz radio frequency spectrum, but it will also support dynamic frequency selection (DFS) in order to handle countries' differing spectrum requirements. The new standard will also support transmit power control (TPC) functions that minimise power output in line with regional laws.

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