In practice, all wireless networks require a network router. Wireless routers let you share your Internet connection and files among all your computers without wires. Without securing your router (either wired or wireless), anyone within range can hack into your Internet connection, see what websites you're visiting, and possibly access your files.

 

In general, two types of encryption standards are available on a router, i.e. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). By default, they are off. Whenever you set up a wireless network by using a network router, you should have to choose an encryption standard under security options the first time to initialise the router.

 

WEP was defined in the 802.11b wireless LAN standard and aimed to provide security by encrypting data over radio waves so that it was protected as it was transmitted from one end point to another. WEP has been the original encryption standard for wireless since 1999, which was updated by WPA in 2003 due to the encryption standard being inadequate to encrypt and a single and constant password applied under WEP is vulnerable to be cracked in a few minutes with a basic laptop computer and widely available software tools.

 

WPA is part of the 802.11i wireless LAN standard and adopts the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) encryption mode that dynamically generates a new 128-bit key for each data packet and thus prevents the types of attacks that compromise WEP. Although WPA is still very secure, WPA2 can support the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-based encryption mode with stronger security than what WPA does, making it harder to hack.

 

Compared with WEP, WPA offers a stronger encryption standard. Both WPA and WPA2 are much more secure than WEP. WPA is an intermediate solution for hardware that cannot support WPA2. WPA is designed as an interim software-implementable solution for WEP that can forestall immediate deployment of new hardware. To add full support for WPA or WPA2, some old Wi-Fi access points might need to be replaced or have their firmware upgraded.

 

One potential downside to WPA2 is that it requires more processing power compared with WPA and it can slow down a network if you are using older hardware that is not in sync with WPA2. If your wireless network hardware is compatible with WPA2, performance hits will be minimal and you most likely won't even notice.

 

The following tips may help you choose encryption standard under security options.

 

* Initialise a router for your wireless network by choosing first to use WPA2 encryption; if that's not supported, try WPA; as a last resort, use WEP.

 

* Create a secure passphrase (password) or named "Pre-shared Key (PSK)" for your chosen WPA or WPA2 encryption standard by using a minimum of eight to 10 characters which include both numbers and letters. Then, devices connected to your wireless network must use this pre-shared key.