A draft version is already being voted on by members of the committee, and with luck it will be polished up and finally approved this fall, with support in wireless products likely to follow soon after. Meanwhile, the 802.11 group is also developing both an improved version of the standard's existing encryption scheme and a new one, based on RC-4 encoding, that's much more powerful. They pointed out, as did their group's initial published response, that the security mechanisms built into the current standard, for all their flaws, actually do provide a considerable degree of protection, at least against the most likely threat, casual eavesdroppers. Apparently many users simply accept the defaults, which makes penetrating the network a cakewalk for any intruder smart enough to try them. Printer friendly version.
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