DOS attack on WPA 802.11?

[Niels Ferguson]

At 13:53 29/11/02 -0500, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
>>But there _isn't_ enough processing power to run a super-Michael. If there
>>were, I'd have designed Michael to be stronger.
>
>I'm not sure that is true for all existing 802.11b hardware. And 
>vendors of new 802.11b hardware could certainly elect to support the 
>stronger variant of WPA.

No, but a new standard has to work on _all_ (or almost all) existing
hardware. Backward compatibility is of primary importance for acceptance of
the new standard. If it isn't backwards compatible it won't be used, which
is much worse.

There will be a stronger variant of WPA: The TGi AES-based protocol. It
just isn't finished yet.


Cheers!

Niels
==============================================================
Niels Ferguson, niels at ferguson.net, phone: +31 20 463 0977
PGP: 3EC2 3304 9B6E 27D9  72E7 E545 C1E0 5D7E

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com