Wireless Internet access has become the norm in most houses in the US these days, everyone has a wireless router, but what most people don’t know is keeping this router secure, what data encryption should you use? WEP or WPA? What is the difference? WEP (wired Equivalent Privacy) is the older form of encryption developed around 1999 to secure wireless Access Points, but when some weaknesses were found on this type of encryption WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) was adopted in 2003 along with the full IEEE 802.11 security standard dubbed (WPA2) which was adopted in 2004.

WPA is better than WEP; WPA uses the TKIP (Temporal Integrity Protocol) which changes key automatically. WPA2 is built on WPA adding an encryption algorithm named CCMP (Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message authentication Code Protocol) which is supposedly be really secure. All Wireless Routers built today requires WPA2 encryption support.

I would recommend everyone using WPA encryption whenever they can, the problem with all these different type of encryptions is that they are not compatible with each other so, if need to hook up multiple devices to the wireless access point and some of them don’t support WPA they won’t be able to connect, so make sure your devices are compatible with the latest wireless encryption, if they are not, use the one all the devices support, or if you have the money upgrade the ones that are not compatible.