Wi-FI

Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity. The communication protocol is governed by IEEE 802.11 family of standards.

WEP = Wired Equivalent Privacy and WPA = Wireless Protected Access are the two encryption protocols that are being used in the Wi-Fi. WEP is considered as a insecure protocol and evolutions of WPA is already in place and WPA3 is considered as the most secure once. Devices to get complaint with IEEE 802.1 standards, it should only support WPA 3.

IEEE 802.11 provides two authentication mechanism for the client to get authenticated with the Wireless Access Point (WAP) prior establishing a communication

1. OSA : Open System Authentication, this protocol is considered as in secure as it doesn't provides any security or encryption. And no authentication is required and only requirement is to have radio signal to establish a connection with the receiver.
2. SKA: Shared Key Authentication, this protocol provides some level of authentication and without proper authentication communication can't be established. And it provides options to use WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA3.

WEP

WEP is known as the wired equivalent Privacy, it uses RC4 symmetric stream cipher for encryption, hashing mechanism for integrity check, knowledge or procession of the key for authentication. The same key will be used by all devices for authentication and encryption. Intercepting the traffic and gaining the access to all the traffic will help the attacker to deduce the key easily. This made the community to declare WEP as a insecure protocol.

WPA

WPA is known as the Wireless Protected Access, and the same uses LEAP (light weight extended authentication protocol) and TKIP (Temporal key integrity protocol) and per packet key that means it will dynamically generate a key for a packet. TKIP replaces the CRC used for integrity check in WEP. It uses a static yet secure passphrase for authentication, and the researches found that this is suspectable for brute force attack and declared as insecure.

WPA2

They are found as the replacement for WPA, and uses NIST FIP140-2 compliant AES for encryption, IEEE 802.11 x authentication method and counter mode cipher block chaining message authentication code protocol (CCMP) but a flaw to steal pre shared login password made the WPA2 as insecure and led to the development of WPA3.