D-Link DWA-X1850 User Manual - Page 16

Section 5 - Wireless Security Wireless Security This section will show you the different levels of security you can use to protect your data from intruders. The DWA-X1850 offers the following types of security: • WPA/WPA2-Personal • WPA/WPA2-Enterprise What is WPA™? WPA™, or Wi-Fi® Protected Access, is a Wi-Fi standard that was designed to improve the security features of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). The 2 major improvements over WEP: • Improved data encryption through the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). TKIP scrambles the keys using a hashing algorithm and, by adding an integrity-checking feature, ensures that the keys haven't been tampered with. WPA2™ is based on 802.11i and uses Advanced Encryption Standard instead of TKIP. • User authentication, which is generally missing in WEP, through the extensible authentication protocol (EAP). WEP regulates access to a wireless network based on a computer's hardware-specific MAC address, which is relatively simple to be sniffed out and stolen. EAP is built on a more secure public-key encryption system to ensure that only authorized network users can access the network. WPA/WPA2-Personal uses a passphrase or key to authenticate your wireless connection. The key is an alpha-numeric password between 8 and 63 characters long. The password can include symbols (!?*&_) and spaces. This key must be the exact same key entered on your wireless router or access point. WPA/WPA2-Enterprise incorporates user authentication through the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). EAP is built on a more secure public key encryption system to ensure that only authorized network users can access the network. D-Link DWA-X1850 User Manual 16