up vote 5 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

Will the performance of my home wireless network be affected by an overly long WPA2-PSK passphrase?

Is the passphrase used only during authentication or is it used to encrypt all frames?

link|improve this question
53% accept rate
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

WPA2 provides AES encryption on your data. The key for this encryption is generated for each session and has no relationship to your passphrase. Your passphrase is really only used for authentication.

Your passphrase will have no affect on your performance.

Source

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

"If ASCII characters are used, the 256 bit key is calculated by applying the PBKDF2 key derivation function to the passphrase, using the SSID as the salt and 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1" The actual protecting codes have set sizes.

Wikipedia

link|improve this answer
1  
just in case i missed it .. did you answer the question? – akira Jan 20 '11 at 14:53
1  
It means that regardless of the ASCII password, the calculated key is always the same number of bits (256). So the length of the password is irrelevant to performance. – Ryan Thompson Jan 20 '11 at 15:12
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.