My old wired router has seen its better days, and periodically stops working for no reason and I have to reset it. And besides that, once in a while our dog, who likes to sit at my feet under my desk, gets tangled up in the mess of wires back there. My wife and I decided it’s time to install a wireless network at home, which would give us more flexibility, the ability to work in different rooms easily, or even sit in the back yard and surf the Net. It sounded like a good idea until I read about the crack in WPA, which was recently reported by security researchers.

Reports say that two reserachers discovered a flaw in WPA encryption, and were able to crack it in about 15 minutes. WPA is still seen as the more secure alternative to WEP. The undisclosed mathematical crack breaks the TKIP key, which is used to encrypt data that runs between the wireless router and the wireless clients. The only other way to attack a WPA connection is through a brute force attack, but for the most part, the latter can be prevented with good passwords that are long, use random characters, and are not easily guessed. Those who have wireless networks are now encouraged to upgrade to WPA2.

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