the wireless networks we use both at home and in our businesses are sending private confidential and sensitive information all the time and we're very concerned that someone might have access to that data especially on a wireless medium that effectively could be tapped into and listened to by any device that happens to be nearby one way that we provide security on this wireless network is to limit what users are able to access the Network we would commonly do this with some type of authentication method such as a username a password or some type of multiactor authentication and of course we want to be sure that everything sent over this wireless network is protected so we need to add confidentiality in the form of encryption and to be sure that we've received the correct information over this wireless network we include a message Integrity check so that we can verify the information that we've received is exactly the information that was originally sent one of the first encryption Types on wireless networks is a method known as wired equivalent privacy or weap unfortunately web was discovered to have some significant cryptographic vulnerabilities so we needed to very quickly replace web with something that was much more secure and that replacement was known as WPA or Wi-Fi protected access WPA was implemented as a temporary stop gap between the insecure web and a more secure version of WPA this first iteration of WPA was designed to work on exactly the same Hardware as that older style web that we were replacing but we knew that we would need enhanced security that we would not currently have available in this initial WPA this replacement WPA we named WPA 2 this is Wi-Fi protected access version two and it's a version that's been around since 200 and four you often see WPA2 reference with a block Cipher mode known as ccmp if we were to spell this out it would be counter mode with Cipher blockchaining message authentication code protocol or counter cbc-mac this effectively combined encryption and integrity in the same protocol the encryption was available with AES and the message Integrity check was enabled using CBC Mac the update to WP PA 2 is WPA 3 this is Wi-Fi protected access version 3 and it was introduced in 2018 this includes a different and more capable block Cipher mode known as gcmp this is galwa counter mode protocol this continues to use AES for data confidentiality and we are using a message Integrity check with the galwa message authentication code or GMAC if you're planning to implement any type of security on your wireless network you want to use use the highest level of security available in your access points and on your client devices and if you have the option you should consider upgrading all of your devices to use the most capable security method available