Wi-Fi Protected Access

A security standard developed by Wi-Fi Alliance (a nonprofit organization formed to certify interoperability of wireless devices) to address the weaknesses of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). This new security standard was called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) Version 1.

The WPA protocol implements the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). WEP uses a 64-bit or 128-bit encryption key that must be manually entered on wireless access points and devices and does not change. TKIP employs a per-packet key, meaning that it dynamically generates a new 128-bit key for each packet and thus prevents the types of attacks that compromise WEP.

WPA was replaced by WPA2 in 2004 which has been replaced by WPA3 since 2018.