WPA3 WiFi Encryption Protocol

Products are coming out that supports the new security encryption protocol WPA3 to replace the older WPA2 encryption protocol.

Wi-Fi Alliance new security standard

The Wi-Fi Alliance that controls the WiFi standard have started to certify products which supports WPA3 encryption protocol.

WPA3 gives extra protection to all WiFi connected devices.

The new standard comes with new protections.

It can prevent older data being compromised and also against offline brute force attacks.

WPA3 WiFi Security

The switch from WPA2 to WPA3 will take many years since all users need to buy new routers and replace old devices that only support WPA/WPA2.

The Wi-FI Alliance expects the deployment of WPA3 to be rolled up and become the standard within the next couple of years.

It will only later on be a requirement for all new products to support WPA3.

The existing widely deployed encryption security protocol WPA2 was released in 2004. 
It took many years for this standard to be implemented and today it is mostly running by default on most WiFi enabled equipment.

With WPA3 it do become harder for remote attackers to crack your password by deploying high powered brute force attacks.

The user ability for normal users will be the same as with WPA2 simply type in a password to connect.

WPA2 WPA3 User Experience

Users might not even notice if they are using WPA2 or WPA3.

The new thing in WPA3 is it adds forward secrecy which can prevent offline attacks by capturing the WPA2 connection handshake for brute force attacks. 

When an attacker captures the WPA3 data for offline attack they can only do 1 guess before the data becomes useless.

Where with WPA2 they can do unlimited guesses hence brute forcing most passwords with high powered servers and GPUs.

It is described by forward secrecy that prevent older captured data to be exploited in an attack.

WPA3 might first start to show use cases from 2020 and forward.

It will come with the next generation WiFi 802.11ax standard.

WPA2 might not go away for a very long time due to all existing hardware, devices, gadgets only support of WPA/WPA2.

The question is also if Hackers / Blackhat attackers will find severe vulnerabilities in WPA3 before the mass roll out.

Some major companies such as Qualcomm has announced their support and making a chip for phones/tablets that supports 802.11ax and WPA3.