WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:38, 11 April 2013

Revision as of 00:48, 4 January 2014

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The comment resolution process failed after agreement could not be established on a variety of fundamental issues. For example, the China NB continued to insist that WAPI was justified because 802.11 included WEP, which is known to be broken. On the other side, the US NB and the IEEE 802.11 NB noted that WEP-based security had been deprecated in favour of WPA2-based security in IEEE 802.11-2007, and that no one had ever alleged any issues with WPA2-based security. In addition, the IEEE 802.11 WG noted that the functionality offered by WAPI systems was equivalent to only a small subset of the security offered by WPA2-based systems.

The China NB eventually withdrew WAPWAPI in October 2011 (document JTC1/SC6N15030) and the project formally cancelled by SC6 in February 2012. The reasons for the withdrawal are unclear. The Chinese proponents of WAPI from IWNCOMM were clearly very unhappy when the withdrawal was announced. It has been speculated that Chinese government authorities ordered the withdrawal on the basis that WAPI had failed to be standardised by ISO/IEC after eight years. In addition, despite mandates for WAPI to be implemented in China in Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones and by the three Chinese service providers, it is very rarely used in practice.

===Chinese cell phone usage===