Wpa(2) – ZyXEL Communications NBG-417N User Manual

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Appendix D Wireless LANs

NBG-417N User’s Guide

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If this feature is enabled, it is not necessary to configure a default encryption key
in the Wireless screen. You may still configure and store keys here, but they will
not be used while Dynamic WEP is enabled.

Note: EAP-MD5 cannot be used with dynamic WEP key exchange

For added security, certificate-based authentications (EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS and
PEAP) use dynamic keys for data encryption. They are often deployed in corporate
environments, but for public deployment, a simple user name and password pair
is more practical. The following table is a comparison of the features of
authentication types.

WPA(2)

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a subset of the IEEE 802.11i standard. WPA2
(IEEE 802.11i) is a wireless security standard that defines stronger encryption,
authentication and key management than WPA.

Key differences between WPA(2) and WEP are improved data encryption and user
authentication.

Encryption

Both WPA and WPA2 improve data encryption by using Temporal Key Integrity
Protocol (TKIP), Message Integrity Check (MIC) and IEEE 802.1x. In addition to
TKIP, WPA2 also uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in the Counter mode
with Cipher block chaining Message authentication code Protocol (CCMP) to offer
stronger encryption.

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) uses 128-bit keys that are dynamically
generated and distributed by the authentication server. It includes a per-packet
key mixing function, a Message Integrity Check (MIC) named Michael, an
extended initialization vector (IV) with sequencing rules, and a re-keying
mechanism.

Table 81 Comparison of EAP Authentication Types

EAP-MD5

EAP-TLS

EAP-TTLS

PEAP

LEAP

Mutual Authentication

Yes

Certificate – Client

Yes

Optional

Certificate – Server

Yes

Dynamic Key Exchange

Yes

Credential Integrity

None

Strong

Moderate

Deployment Difficulty

Easy

Hard

Moderate

Client Identity
Protection

Yes