WPA/WPA2 Technical Information

The USF-GOLD network allows for both WPA and WPA2 authentication, and for both TKIP and AES encryption. WPA2 is another name for 802.11i, the IEEE's current 'state-of-the-art' standard for wireless authentication and encryption.

WPA and WPA2 both use EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) for authentication. There are several common EAP authentication methods (EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-PEAP, EAP-FAST). USF-GOLD uses EAP-PEAP (Protected EAP) along with MSCHAPV2 hashed passwords. This EAP method is the most widely supported among all operating systems.

TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) utilizes the same encryption technology as WEP, but was the industry's first attempt at correcting the security issues uncovered several years ago with WEP. It mitigates the problems with WEP making TKIP an acceptable encryption protocol.

AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a much better encryption technology and is the preferred option when connecting to USF-GOLD. However, hardware support for AES does not exist in all current wireless cards, whereas TKIP is more widely supported.