The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Are all WPA routers firmware upgradeabe to WPA2?

    Discussion in 'Networking and Wireless' started by dqm, Jul 5, 2006.

  1. dqm

    dqm Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    77
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Most of the budget routers nowadays seem to support WPA but I've seen very few that support WPA2?

    So my question is - if I bought a WPA enabled router, could I upgrade it to WPA2? Assuming of course, that the manufacturer has an upgrade available for it.

    Also, how big of a security is WPA really? I know it has vulnerabililities but I wanted to get an idea of the real world problems.

    TIA!
     
    dqm, Jul 5, 2006
    #1
  2. downloads

    downloads No, Dee Dee, no! Super Moderator

    Reputations:
    7,729
    Messages:
    8,722
    Likes Received:
    2,231
    Trophy Points:
    331
    As for the security of WPA- it's way better than WEP and the risk is not that high but in terms of security additional 20$ for a good router with WPA2 (and probably a few extra features, faster CPU etc) is not much.

    WPA2 uses AES as encryption system where as WPA uses TKIP. AES is much stronger but it has to use hardware encryption- meaning that the wireless processor has to do AES encryption/decryption. Another words WPA has nothing to do with WPA2- it's not even a bit similar.

    My recommendation is go for WPA2 (and save money somewhere else)

    Regards
     
    downloads, Jul 5, 2006
    #2