Wi-Fi Alliance Launches WPA3 Protocol With New Security Features

Hello guys,

Today, I’ll be expounding about something that I think everyone can get excited about because it literally is something that everyone uses “Wi-Fi”. More specifically, there's a new Wi-Fi security protocol called “WPA3” coming out to superseded “WPA2” which most people use now.

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You might be thinking that it’s kinda boring and how could that be exciting?

It’s actually very interesting and has some big improvement over what we use now, there's a lot of issues with WPA2 but I will explain why WPA3 is very relevant and will be more convenient for you.

First of all, if you're not familiar with WPA and what all that means, it's basically just a security protocol for Wi-Fi and first we had WEP which was really old from like the 90s, then in 2003 we got WPA and then in 2004 we got WPA2. These are just to secure the connection between your computer, device and your Wi-Fi router and the idea is that you don't want people spying on what you're doing, so you have a passcode and using that passcode, it encrypts the connection.

Like I said, WPA2 has been around for a while since 2004, so it's about time we got an upgrade and it was announced by Wi-Fi Alliance very recently. Keep in mind that this is not a new protocol for Wi-Fi itself, it's not like a C or N or anything that's gonna speed up Wi-Fi, it's just the security part so those are separate things.

I'm sure at this point you're wondering what the actual differences are with WPA3 and there are 3 main improvements that the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced.

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Password protection

There's going to be robust protection for poor passwords even if someone has a bad password, it's going to prevent Brute-Force attacks by actually limiting how often you can guess a password. Right now presumably, you can basically try as many passwords on a router as you want, so you can try thousands a second and if someone has a really bad password with no numbers and letters or anything, then it's not gonna take very long at all for a hacker to guess that password.

With this limiting factor, you might only be able to try a few, so even if a hacker tries to Brute-Force it or use a dictionary attack, it's gonna be so slow where it probably wouldn't even be worth it but of course, you still want to use a relatively strong password because you can never be too secure.

Individualized encryption per user

I would say this is the biggest feature and it means that even if you're connecting without a password, if you're using a public Wi-Fi hotspot, your connection will still be encrypted. Currently, it’s actually not that great, if you connect to a secure Wi-Fi hotspot with a password, it uses that password to encrypt your connection. If there's no password on the Wi-Fi hotspot like a public one out in the open, then there's no encryption at all. Anyone listening can see what is going on between you and that router obviously, that’s really bad.

With this feature, even if you are connecting to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, it'll still be encrypted which solves so many problems. Presumably, the individualized encryption means that every single-person is gonna have their own encryption key, so you're gonna be secure no matter what. It's really just better in every way and that alone is a really good reason why you should start using it as soon as it does become available.

192 bit length key stronger encryption

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WPA3 will have stronger encryption, it'll use a 192 bit key length key which is a lot stronger than the current one which is 128-bit and even still yet to be cracked, but again, I guess they're figuring future-proof so 192 is just really strong. Obviously, I would say that really all of these new features are awesome and there might be small ones to add to the list.

You might be wondering when are we going to be able to use this awesome new security

It's actually out right now, the standard is out and finalized but the first devices that use it might take a while probably this year, we'll start to see the first couple routers from like cutting edge ones even if devices can't really use it yet. Probably the end of next year, I'm sure we'll start to get phones that will actually use it. I'm not sure if a software update will be able to update devices to be able to use WPA3, I hope it will, though it will be backwards compatible. If you're running a router that uses WPA3 then it will be able to use the same WPA2 security.

I guess that's pretty much about it, but I'd love to hear what you guys think, Are you excited about this as I am? I know it's super nerdy to be excited about Wi-Fi encryption but hey! What can I say? It’s pretty cool and it will be directly useful. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to hit that upvote button.

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References: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3

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Thanks to @camzy for this amazing toon.