WPA3 Incoming!

WPA3

Our needs.

If you pay any attention to the word security you definitely got password on your Wi-Fi. And this is it ? Only password? I got bad news for you. Any IT professional with some spare time or/and motivation can access you Wi-Fi, and after get access in your home or company network. So available nowadays and uses as something natural like air or water Wi-Fi is not so simple thing.

To maintain properly secured Wi-Fi is a hard job. Somebody think that they got nothing to hide, and this misunderstanding could cost them nightmares until the end of their life, especially if your PC connected permanently to targeted Wi-Fi.  What is more important that Wi-Fi is not the cable you can control access to. Anybody can try to attack the Wi-Fi you are using, from your beloved neighbor to authorities who got some suspicious questions to you. And if you just unboxed the Wi-Fi router and following quick-step-guide installed the ISP settings and password you did nothing to protect you data. Ecpecialy if you are lazy enough to use WPS option – the best door for all type of Wi-Fi attacks.

Standards.

This is the huge bunch of knowledge about Wi-Fi standards for protection your connection that I will simply name most commonly used for the last 15 years. WEP, WPA and WPA2 (or no protection at all). Also encryption of the password for these standards could be mostly TKIP or AES. All these were not perfect but could provide you with some understating of your protection.

In the end of 2017 it was clearly proved than the best WPA2 standard widely accepted in 2004 is no longer a secure solution. The WPA3 was developing straight after WPA2 and in 2007 the major methods and algorithms of WPA3 were formulated. But only in 2016 its polished and shaped for production. But don’t forget about greediness of the business. Everybody realized this nightmare to allow simply upgrade firmware to make Wi-Fi boxes move to WPA3. So in 2018 the market slowly started to see WPA3 compatible hardware.

It’s been more than a year since final vulnerability of WPA2 was announced in OCT 2017.

Hardware.

There were lots of preorders and as usual some specific artificial demand for WPA3 hardware, artificially increased prices. Even in the beginning of 2019 it is hard to quickly obtain Wi-Fi router. And what I personally advise not to wait and not to buy. Yes. Simply ignore these greedy bustards like Netgear, Tp-link or Dlink. All you pay is for logo on the plastic box. There is a harder but more righteous way.

Hostapd.

Welcome his majesty Hostapd. It is Wi-Fi software, purely open-source, robust and available almost for any platform. And yes it fully support WPA3 protocol. We are living in the wonderful time and experience excessive saturation of IT hardware on the market. For instance you can buy a powerful box like Orang Pi, or Rasberry Pi and create a wifi router of your dream, predictable, stable, powerful and secured. Simply install hostapd on these platform and you are good to go. But there is even better solution.

Openwrt Project.

You can use same approach like with hostapd but without need to think too much about how to install everything and put together. You simply install OpenWRT and will get enterprise level of wired and Wi-Fi management via web GUI.

Stay always alert.

Even if you at last completed your move to WPA3 you could be potentially in troubles and if you require paranoid level of Wi-Fi protection you will need to secure your communication with VPN. What!? Yes, VPN between you mobile, laptop or PC and your access point. And not just an ordinary commercial solution but own built Open-VPN implementation or WireGuard. This is hard, it’s required definite skill, and this is whole another new story.

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