WEP vs. WPA

[Gary Thornock]

--- Wade Preston Shearer <lists at wadeshearer.com> wrote:
> I am trying to determine the difference between the WEP and
> WPA wireless security protocols. I have found documentation
> describing the two, but have not been able to determine why one
> would choose one over the other.

WEP is the older of the two systems, and has some flaws that make
it fairly easy to break (hence the need for a new system, WPA).
If you're running with recent hardware and your OS supports WPA,
WPA is the better option.

On the other hand, if you have older hardware, you may not have
the option to run WPA, and it's new enough that some OSes don't
support it well.  FreeBSD, for instance, didn't add WPA support
until 6.0, and there are still quite a few people out there who
run 4.x.