Lab Notes

Wi-Fi Net News reports that Atheros has made their JumpStart code open source. JumpStart is their (previously) proprietary means of enhancing the security of WPA-PSK. Instead of using a static encryption key derived from a single shared password, encryption keys are generated dynamically using Diffie-Hellman. This gives a Wi-Fi network longer, harder-to-guess encryption keys, but without the strong user authentication of WPA Enterprise. It also requires hardware support from access point vendors, but based on the details posted by Atheros thus far, it looks like a step forward from plain WPA-PSK. Hopefully it will get some traction.