WPA3 hits the scene to help protect your wireless network against attacks

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Wi-Fi security hasn’t changed much in nearly 15 years. Thanks to a new Wi-Fi standard called WPA3, improvements are finally coming, however, according to The Verge.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is beginning to certify products that support WPA3. It will eventually replace the WPA2 protocol that’s been in use since 2004.

According to The Verge,

The new protocol provides a number of additional protections for devices connected over Wi-Fi. One big improvement makes it harder for hackers to crack your password by guessing it over and over again, and another limits what data hackers can see even once they’ve uncovered the passcode. Nothing will change as far as users see it; you’ll still just type in your password and connect to the network.

WPA3 will slowly start arriving on new products beginning this year alongside software updates for older ones. Even then, however, the full force of WPA3 won’t be felt for many years to come since both your router and your gadgets will need to support it.

The Verge continues,

The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data from your Wi-Fi stream, brings it back to a private computer, and guesses passwords over and over again until they find a match. With WPA3, attackers are only supposed to be able to make a single guess against that offline data before it becomes useless; they’ll instead have to interact with the live Wi-Fi device every time they want to make a guess. (And that’s harder since they need to be physically present, and devices can be set up to protect against repeat guesses.)

WPA3 also includes so-called forward secrecy. This feature prevents older data from being compromised by a later attack. So if an attacker captures an encrypted Wi-Fi transmission, for example, then cracks the password, they still can’t read the older data.

For now, new products don’t need to support WPA3, although that will eventually change. In 2019, the next generation of Wi-Fi, 902.11ax, is arriving. When that happens, the Wi-Fi Alliance expects the pace of adoption to increase. Sometime later,  WPA3 will become a requirement.

Are you happy to see a new Wi-Fi security protocol come online?  

For more Wi-Fi and router news, see: 

• Tips on devising a great Wi-Fi network on a company
• Wi-Fi extender or Wi-Fi bridge: What’s the difference?
• This bad-ass Beam router will put the smack-down on your ISP’s prying tendrils