Home > IT Answers > Networking > Does increasing the length of the TKIP passph...
Help

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

Subscribe to Alerts! Get questions and answers delivered to your Inbox.


E-mail me updates on this question



   SUBSCRIBE

hidden modal window
Help

Answer Wiki (Improve, edit or add to this answer)

IMPROVE THIS ANSWER
View History
 RATE THIS ANSWER
0
Click to Vote:
  •   0
  •  0
Last Answered: May 28 2008  11:49 PM GMT  by Labnuke99




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.
  • AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Browse more Questions and Answers on Networking, Mobile and Security.

Looking for relevant Networking Whitepapers? Visit the SearchNetworking.com Research Library.


RSS - Discussions Help

Discuss This Answer


You must be logged-in to discuss a question. Log-in/Register

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