Wireless local area networks (WLANs) play an indispensable part in today’s communications infrastructure. Although WLANs are more versatile and convenient than wired networks, they also tend to be slower and less secure. Effectively addressing the latter problem with minimal hindrance to performance is the purpose of WLAN security protocols. WEP, WPA, and WPA2 protocols are the results of successive attempts at reaching this goal. Throughout their development, different methods of security provision were tried, leading to divergent results.
Comparing the effectiveness of WLAN security protocols reveals considerable improvement from earlier to more advanced versions. However, this progress has not been linear and straightforward in all regards. The earliest protocol, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), offers weak encryption that could be overcome within hours (Osterhage, 2018). Its weakness stems from the entire network using a single encryption key using 40-bit or, in later updates, 104-bit encryption. By contrast, the Wi-fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol uses the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to generate temporary 128-bit keys for individual packets and authenticate message integrity. WPA2 further improves on its predecessor by incorporating the Advanced Encryption Standard in its encryption protocol, allowing it to encrypt individual blocks. While each new protocol makes it progressively harder to compromise entire networks, those improvements are partly offset by increased performance requirements. All security protocols reduce WLAN throughput, but WPA causes a much sharper drop than WEP, which also offers better performance than WPA2 with IPv6 (Alghamdi, 2019). Thus, the decision to use any of those protocols is based on a tradeoff between security and speed.
WEP, WPA, and WPA2 represent distinct stages in the development of WLAN security measures. Whereas WEP uses a single cipher key for the whole network, WPA encrypts data packets, and WPA2 encrypts individual blocks. Although more granular security methods make it significantly harder to compromise the entire network, they are also more demanding from the performance standpoint. While WPA2 is far superior in terms of security, it may be less desirable for older devices due to its resource requirements.
References
Alghamdi, T. M. (2019). Throughput analysis of IEEE WLAN “802.11 ac” under WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security protocols. International Journal of Computer Networks, 9(1), 1-13.
Osterhage, W. (2018). Wireless network security (2nd ed.). CRC Press.