Short for Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 - Pre-Shared
Key, and also called WPA or WPA2 Personal, it is a
method of securing your network using WPA2 with the use
of the optional Pre-Shared Key (PSK) authentication, which was designed for home
users without an enterprise authentication server.
To encrypt a network with WPA2-PSK you provide your router not with an
encryption key, but rather with a plain-English passphrase between 8 and 63
characters long. Using a technology called TKIP (for
Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), that passphrase, along with the network SSID,
is used to generate unique encryption keys for each wireless client. And those
encryption keys are constantly changed. Although WEP also supports passphrases,
it does so only as a way to more easily create static keys, which are usually
comprised of the hex characters 0-9 and A-F.
