Question

  Asked: May 12 2008   3:18 PM GMT
  Asked by: Techy


Does increasing the length of the TKIP passphrase (WPA ) decrease throughput?


Wireless security, WPA, TKIP, Passphrase, Temporal Key Integrity Protocol

Hi, I am currently experimenting to determine and measure the overhead/throughput decrease that WPA Personal - TKIP encryption causes to wireless networks. the test bed I used is a Linksys AP along with 2 very similar laptops (1 wired-100mbps ethernet and 1 wireless - 802.11g). I use the software called LanTraffic on both laptops. On the wireless laptop, I generate packets sizes ranging from 1024KB-8192KB and measuring throughput with a 1ms inter packet delay. I then user encryption - tkip: a 10 letter passphrase and repeat the above tests and then keep increasing the passphrase length by 10 every cycle.
I tried it using 54Mbps at first and then decreased it to 6Mbps and get different numbers but again no signifcant reduction.

The weird part is that I do not get any significant reduction in the throughput. Is this normal? Does anybody know why this is going on? or what I can change to get more accurate results?

Thank you in advance

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The TKIP pre-shared key is really only used to authenticate the devices during the initial transaction setup. In the IPSec world, this is considered Phase1 negotiations. It does not have any effect on additional communications after the connection is established.
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Alessandro.panzetta  |   May 14 2008  2:47PM GMT

To my knowledge the amount of data passing wont be affected by the WPA/WPA2 or other auth methods because what is changing is the algorythm at the enpoints so at a different layer…in this case the majority of the “job” is done by the AP and the computer itself not affecting the throughput.
Bye