The Wi-Fi Alliance, the global network of organizations working together to bring the world Wi-Fi, announced enhancements to their security measures yesterday that will be available later this year.
Building on their widespread adoption and success of WPA2, Wi-Fi Certified WPA3 will offer new features to simplify and enhance security for users and service providers on personal and enterprise networks. WPA2 is the security standard that protects billions of Wi-Fi networks every day.
Four new features will debut in 2018 as part of WPA3, with two of the new features designed to deliver robust protections even when users use weak passwords, and will simplify the process of configuring security for devices with limited or no display interface.
The third feature will help strengthen one of the biggest challenges facing users of public Wi-Fi networks- others on the same network snooping on their sessions. This new feature will strengthen user privacy in open network through individualized data encryption. The final new feature will help further protect Wi-Fi networks with higher security requirements such as government, defense, and industrial.
The Wi-Fi Alliance also announced enhancements to the WPA2 protocol used by the majority of organizations today. It claims testing improvements will significantly reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities resulting from network misconfiguration and safeguard management networks with centralized authentication.
This update couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, considering the protocol took a significant hit when researchers discovered a serious vulnerability (KRACK) back in October 2017 that could allow attackers to eavesdrop of users’ data. The KRACK vulnerability found in WPA2 would allow hackers to break the security model and compromise Wi-Fi traffic between wireless devices and the targeted Wi-Fi network, including information like passwords, photos, and chat messages.
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