WPA or WEP security???

Vlad Drac

Vlad Drac

Vlad Drac

Associate
Joined
12 Mar 2004
Posts
730
Location
Scotland
Hi All...

I just got my self a nice new Netgear DG834N ADSL router.
Can any of you tell me what is the better wireless security to use, WEP or WPA???
I seem to have a choice what to use. My old BT Voyager used to use WEP so I was just going to use that again.
Any ideas whats the better???
 
As above, its not really a choice these days. WPA is vastly superior in terms of security and to be honest, any well informed 14 year old with access to a laptop and the web can crack your WEP.

Don't use WEP unless absolutely necessary and don't be fooled by those people that think hiding their SSID and switching on MAC access control lists are sufficient either.

All of these measures can be fairly easily subverted by a well researched average 'Joe'.
 
Whichever you do, make sure you use a long passphrase with a mix of numbers and letters in different cases. Using 'password' makes WPA no stronger than anything else.
 
In my house this year one of my housemates wants to use WEP as thats the only one that the wii supports. He says that you can use a really long password on it so that it is deffinatly secure, is this the case? Im not totally convinced on this and want to be 100% sure that no one would be able to gain access to our wireless network.
 
how random said:
In my house this year one of my housemates wants to use WEP as thats the only one that the wii supports. He says that you can use a really long password on it so that it is deffinatly secure, is this the case? Im not totally convinced on this and want to be 100% sure that no one would be able to gain access to our wireless network.
Click to expand...

I'm afraid he's talking bull, my Wii is connected via WPA2 AES
 
Obviously you would choose WPA or WPA2 if you could, but even if you did use WEP, or even no security at all and people were using you're 'net connection, just get a Policeman over to arrest the thief.

I use WDS using WEP for 3 wireless APs. I use a really long randomly generated password. I've never had any problems.
 
The passphrase length with WEP is irrelevant. WEP's so flawed that you don't need to brute force the passphrase.
 
All WEP is crackable very easily. But then most people cannot do it or cannot be bothered. Dont be paranoid if your using WEP but if you can use WPA then use that.
 
I;m using a WRT54GL Linksys router with Tomato firmware, it has a random character generator, and the WPA2 is about 50 characters lon, mix of upper case, lower case and symbols.

Is it secure enough using the router passkey generator? I mean it should almost be fully random shouldnt it?
 
I reckon so. It's darn unlikely that somebody's going to guess such a password so they'd have to brute force it. That would take aaaaaages with a full length key (63 characters).
 
wpa is just as strong as wpa2, atm and for the forseeable future the only way to crack either is through brute force so i wouldn't sweat it.
 
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