For me, it is great to see wireless network integration in the home. Music and videos can be shared between users, amongst many other files. If you are sharing important files such as legal papers, or any other kind of sensitive material, the way your network may be setup is vital. You do not want anyone overlooking what you’re doing, right? We all know that if you are purchasing music from the iTunes Store and you enter your credit card information, you only want Apple to know that and not anyone else. When securing your wireless network, you basically much have two options, WEP and WPA.
The most common way to secure your network/router is called WEP, Wired Equivalency Privacy. It uses an encryption that is based off the password you input. It has been used since 1997 and has been improved since. Hackers are able to crack WEP passwords in less than 2 minutes. If a group of hackers were to drive down a street with a laptop, they would scan for wireless networks that use WEP security and try to get anything valuable. It would take them about 2 minutes to get through WEP, and even though there have been improvements, it only lengthens the time to hack through which isn’t really a problem for hackers. Overall, it was developed with having it as the same security as having a wired network, but it didn’t turn out that way.
On the other hand, WPA has, by far, has better encryption methods. It uses temporary keys to add users to a network, so that a master key is rarely used. Hackers would take many, many hours trying to crack WPAs encryption, but most of the time they have failed. WPA has been universally accepted and has been certified with the Wi-Fi Alliance, which is a group of the top 300 members working for better network security. Each device that uses WPA creates its own set of keys that is unique to that device. So if I decided the word “Password” as my password, the router would come up with 4 sets of numbers and letters. If I did that on another router with the same password, the 4 sets of numbers would be different to the other router. You would only have to use one of those keys to join a network.
I hope novice network users find this useful, because they maybe at a flaw and not even know it. If you don’t have WPA as a setting on your router, it’s best to have WEP set up anyway because it’s better than having no security at all.
