The WiFi Alliance has announced the new wireless standard, WPA3, at CES in Las Vegas. The new family of WiFi security technologies comes shortly after WPA2, which every wireless device in the world today uses, was found to be vulnerable to the KRACK exploit.
WPA3 will be launched later this year, with ‘a suite of features to simplify Wi-Fi security configuration for users and service providers’, as well as four brand new capabilities.
Two of the new features will focus on protecting users that choose weak passwords or those that have little experience in configuring security settings. This latter function is said to simplify the process of changing security for devices that have little or no display interface, like many Internet Of Things (IoT) products.
WPA3 will also protect networks with higher security requirements (i.e. government, military and industrial) through a 192-bit security suite, ‘aligned with the Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) Suite from the Committee on National Security Systems’.
Another feature will focus on using individualised data encryption to raise privacy on open networks.