In cryptography, TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) is a security protocol used in Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). WPA is used for WiFi networks to correct deficiencies in the older Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard. TKIP (pronounced "tee-kip") was designed to replace WEP without replacing legacy hardware. This was necessary because the breaking of WEP had left WiFi networks without viable link-layer security and solution to this problem could not wait for the replacement of deployed hardware. For this reason, TKIP, like WEP, uses a key scheme based on RC4, but unlike WEP, TKIP provides per-packet key mixing, a message integrity check and a re-keying mechanism. TKIP ensures that every data packet is sent with its own unique encryption key. The German Lorenz cipher machine Cryptography or cryptology is a field of mathematics and computer science concerned with information security and related issues, particularly encryption and authentication. ... A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete protocol that performs a security-related function and applies cryptographic methods. ... Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a class of systems to secure wireless (Wi-Fi) computer networks. ... Wi-Fi (or Wi-fi, WiFi, Wifi, wifi), short for Wireless Fidelity, is a set of standards for wireless local area networks (WLAN) currently based on the IEEE 802. ... Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a scheme to secure wireless networks (WiFi). ... In cryptography, RC4 (or ARCFOUR) is the most widely-used software stream cipher and is used in popular protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) (to protect Internet traffic) and WEP (to secure wireless networks). ... In telecommunication, the term data integrity has the following meanings: The condition that exists when data is unchanged from its source and has not been accidentally or maliciously modified, altered, or destroyed. ...

Key mixing increases the complexity of decoding the keys by giving the cracker much less data that has been encrypted using any one key. The message integrity check prevents forged packets from being sent. Under WEP it was possible to alter a packet whose content was known even if it had not been decrypted. Also TKIP hashes the initialization vector (IV) values, which are sent as plaintext, with the WPA key to form the RC4 traffic key, addressing one of WEP's largest security weaknesses. WEP simply concatenated its key with the IV to form the traffic key, allowing a successful related key attack. In cryptography, a cryptographic hash function is a hash function with certain additional security properties to make it suitable for use as a primitive in various information security applications, such as authentication and message integrity. ... In cryptography, an initialization vector (IV) is a block of bits that is required to allow a stream cipher or a block cipher executed in any of several streaming modes of operation to produce a unique stream independent from other streams produced by the same encryption key, without having to... The plain text term has a different meaning. ... In cryptography, a related-key attack is any form of cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker has the capability to consider the operation of a cipher under several different keys. ...

References

• Jon Edney and Arbaugh, Real 802.11 Security: Wi-Fi Protected Access and 802.11i, Addison Wesley, 2003 (Updated in 2004), ISBN 0321136209.