Today I saw the advantage in diversity. I saw first hand the reason why you have to undergo this rigorous training and study a lot of materials and have at least one year of hands-on experience on the job before attempting to write the Comptia A+ exams for an IT professional.
The reason for this is to give you a lot of exposure and with hands-on experience, some of the principles will sink in. Despite this known advantage that comes with hands-on experience, the IT beginner is often flooded with a lot of information and the rate at which most of these technologies go obsolete means that a successful IT professional must be committed to a life-long learning. With that being said, a proper understanding of the basic principles can give the mind the necessary tools for imagination and creativity which is an ingredient for thinking outside the box.
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
A wireless security standard developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance is a security authentication protocol that has quickly replaced the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which provides a very low level of privacy and encryption of 40 bits. The original WPA standard was released in 2003 and has seen the supersession with the WPA2 and by 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the WPA3 with the aim of simplifying Wi-Fi security, increasing cryptographic strength and enabling better authentication.
The WPA3
Is a new standard and by the time of this writing, most of the Access Points (AP) wireless card that had been deployed do not have their hardware built to support WPA3 encryptions, this was my experience recently when I was troubleshooting a user’s laptop that cannot connect to an AP with a WPA3 wireless security encryption.
Network administrators must however take into considerations that the WPA3 encryption has not seen wide adoptions as its relatively new and that most wireless drivers have not been or in most cases do not have the hardware requirement to support the WPA3 encryption and should always implement the option of WPA2/WPA3 type of encryption to authenticate a wider range of devices and save the Support technician time in trying to find a work around. Recently, my supervisor informed me that in most cases they were forced to change the laptops to support the WPA3 encryption.
The WPA2 is still a valid standard for encryption, however, the WPA3 offers a whole lot of advantage especially in supporting the new 802.11ax wireless protocol also called the Wi-Fi 6 which is believed to have a better wall penetration, better suited for Internet of Things (IoT) with improved connectivity speed.