Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP)

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) is an encryption protocol designed to enhance the security of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard, commonly known as Wi-Fi. TKIP was introduced as a stopgap solution to address the vulnerabilities in WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), the original encryption protocol for Wi-Fi.

TKIP was developed to provide improvements in security over WEP without requiring the replacement of legacy hardware. It was part of the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard.

Unlike WEP, which uses static keys, TKIP implements a key mixing function that combines the root key with the packet's initialization vector. This process creates a unique key for each packet, significantly improving security.

TKIP changes the encryption key for each packet, making it much more difficult for attackers to decipher the key by analyzing patterns in data packets.

TKIP includes a stronger integrity check called Michael to provide better protection against data tampering and integrity attacks compared to the CRC32 check used in WEP. It also introduces a re-keying mechanism to change the temporal keys at regular intervals, further enhancing security.

TKIP was designed to be implemented on existing hardware through a firmware upgrade, making it an attractive option for improving security on devices that originally only supported WEP.

TKIP still uses the RC4 stream cipher (also used in WEP) for encrypting data, but with a more secure implementation that addresses WEP's weaknesses. While TKIP provided improvements over WEP, it was not without its vulnerabilities. Over time, several weaknesses were identified in TKIP, making it susceptible to certain types of cryptographic attacks.

In WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access II), the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with CCMP (Counter Mode Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol) replaced TKIP as the preferred encryption method, offering a higher level of security.

Due to its vulnerabilities, TKIP is now considered deprecated. Modern Wi-Fi networks and devices use WPA2 with AES for encryption, which is more secure and efficient than TKIP.