Aztech Wireless N USB Adapter User Manual page 22

User Manual
Encryption Mode
WPA improves data encryption by using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), Message
Integrity Check (MIC) and IEEE 802.1X. WPA2 use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in
the Counter mode with Cipher block chaining Message authentication code Protocol
(CCMP) to offer stronger encryption than TKIP.
The encryption mechanism used for WPA(2) and WPA(2)-PSK are the same. The only
difference between them is that WPA(2)-PSK uses a simple common password, instead
of user specific credentials. The common password approach makes WPA(2)-PSK
susceptible to brute-force password-guessing attacks but it's still an improvement over
WEP as it employs a consistent, single, alphanumeric password to derive a PMK which is
used to generate unique temporal encryption keys.
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