Alan Spicer Marine Telecom http://www.wifiyacht.net © 2007
In my
article Wireless-WEP-Keys I
promised (article
on WPA coming later...) Well here it is. WPA is a good idea. If your
wireless on your computers and your access points can support it you
should use it rather than WEP.
WPA is more secure than WEP. WiFi Protected Access - solves problems in WEP that make it possible for knowledgeable persons to crack it. One thing is that once you set your initial key or passphrase the actual keys used is changed automatically very very often. A lot more often (seconds) than you could ever dream of changing WEP Keys.
You will want to change your Wireless Security Setting in your Access Points to WPA-PSK - WiFi Protected Access Pre-shared Key, and TKIP - Temporal Key Integrity Protocol. You will still have to enter the same Passphrase or Hexadecimal key into both your access points and Computers but the length requirement is changed. This passphrase (also called a shared secret) that must be entered in both the wireless access point and the WPA clients (computers). This shared secret can technically be between 8 and 63 characters and can include special characters and spaces. The WPA preshared key should be a random sequence of either keyboard characters (upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation) at least 20 characters long or hexadecimal digits (numbers 0-9 and letters A-F) at least 24 hexadecimal digits long. The more random your WPA preshared key, the safer it is to use. You can also use Pass Phrases these days that is a common word like boatname+otherword, Example: hotboatwireless, or another phrase that you will remember. It should be as long as you can make it and remember it.
A portion of this was taken from: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_03july28.mspx. Here is the Hexadecimal information from my other article should you still need it.
My Telephone Number is: 954-683-3426, or 954-977-5245.
Thank You.
WPA is more secure than WEP. WiFi Protected Access - solves problems in WEP that make it possible for knowledgeable persons to crack it. One thing is that once you set your initial key or passphrase the actual keys used is changed automatically very very often. A lot more often (seconds) than you could ever dream of changing WEP Keys.
You will want to change your Wireless Security Setting in your Access Points to WPA-PSK - WiFi Protected Access Pre-shared Key, and TKIP - Temporal Key Integrity Protocol. You will still have to enter the same Passphrase or Hexadecimal key into both your access points and Computers but the length requirement is changed. This passphrase (also called a shared secret) that must be entered in both the wireless access point and the WPA clients (computers). This shared secret can technically be between 8 and 63 characters and can include special characters and spaces. The WPA preshared key should be a random sequence of either keyboard characters (upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation) at least 20 characters long or hexadecimal digits (numbers 0-9 and letters A-F) at least 24 hexadecimal digits long. The more random your WPA preshared key, the safer it is to use. You can also use Pass Phrases these days that is a common word like boatname+otherword, Example: hotboatwireless, or another phrase that you will remember. It should be as long as you can make it and remember it.
A portion of this was taken from: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_03july28.mspx. Here is the Hexadecimal information from my other article should you still need it.
Hexadecimal
[end of article.]Hexadecimal,
as you may already know, is just another numbering system. Instead of
our Base-10, hexadecimal uses Base-16 which means it has 16 possible
digits (we'll call them characters because certain digits in hex. are
actually letters) they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, A, B, C, D,
E, F.
My Telephone Number is: 954-683-3426, or 954-977-5245.
Thank You.
[end of article]
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