ZyXEL Communications P-870HN-5xb Support Notes page 83

Wi-Fi Protected Access Introduction
The Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is a subset of the IEEE 802.11i security
specification draft. Key differences between the WAP and WEP are user
authentication and improved data encryption. The WAP applies the IEEE 802.1x
Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) to authenticate wireless clients using an
external RADIUS database. You can not use the P-870HN-5xb's local user database
for WPA authentication purpose, since the local user database uses the MD5 EAP
which can not generate keys.
The WPA improves data encryption by using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol
(TKIP), Message Integrity Check and IEEE 802.1x. Temporal Key Integrity Protocol
uses 128-bits keys that are dynamically generated and distributed by the
authentication server. It includes a per-packet key mixing function, a Message
Integrity Check (MIC) named Michael, an extend initialization vector (IV) with
sequencing rules and a re-keying mechanism.
If you do not have an external RADIUS and server, you should use the WPA-PSK
(WPA Pre-Share Key) that only requires a single (identical) password entered into
each access point, wireless gateway and wireless client. As long as the passwords
match, a client will be granted to access to a WLAN.
All contents copyright (c) 2009 ZyXEL Communications Corporation.
P-870HN-5xb Support Notes