Wireless security announcement Wireless security announcement

News agencies are reporting a security problem with a type of wireless network encryption called WPA2, which can allow an attacker to view, or in some circumstances modify a user's wireless traffic.

Although WSU does use WPA2 encryption on its WSU Secure wireless network, university wireless security is not believed to be significantly impacted at this time. WSU Secure wireless uses WPA2 primarily to require your WSU ID to log in to wireless. Both your WSU ID and your sensitive browsing (myWSU, banking and many other sites such as Facebook, Google and Amazon) are still protected by an additional layer of encryption that isn't impacted by this problem.

Until security patches are released, browsing on WSU Secure may be thought of like browsing at a coffee shop -- a determined attacker in close physical proximity may be able to see your browser activity (HTTP) to websites that aren't specifically secured by TLS encryption (HTTPS, with a padlock icon in your browser's address bar).