Question Energy consumption in wifi

[Deleted member 2966688]

Hey. Does enabling only wpa2 mode uses more power than wpa3/wpa2. And do routers use a lot of power. I mean it's not much when a single device is connected for an hour. But 2 tvs 5 phones using data 24/7 it probably adds up. Since the tvs and phones are constantly processing information

 

[bill001g]

Since I assume you are a home user the key difference between WPA2 and WPA3 is related to how the login to the wifi network is done. In theory at least a hacker could determine the preshared key using a offline super computer. WPA3 uses a method closer to the enterprise model where the login keys are unique for each user.

WPA2/WPA3 is not the encryption of the data itself. Let say you tell your friend your preshared key rather than them hacking wpa2 to get it. What happens is as you log in the router and your pc generate a unique key for that session that changes everytime you connect and is different for every device that connects. These keys are the ones that are used for the actual data encryption. So what you would do is use the preshared key to decode these initial messages to get the real session keys.
Just having the preshared key does not directly let you read the data.

This is still very much corporate or government level spy stuff. It takes way too much effort to first crack the pre shared key and then listen in as someone logs in to the network to capture the actual unique encryption keys.

But to your question WPA2/WPA3 is only used when someone first connects so any difference in power usage would be insignificant as a percentage of the total use.

If you want to know how much power your router uses buy something like a kill-a-watt. This is very popular brand of devices that will measure power usages. It has many competitor lately. There are some that will let you upload historic data by hour etc.

Now other than something new to play with I suspect you will pay more for the kill-a-watt device than you would ever save since a router uses extremely small amounts of power.

 

[Deleted member 2966688]

Since I assume you are a home user the key difference between WPA2 and WPA3 is related to how the login to the wifi network is done. In theory at least a hacker could determine the preshared key using a offline super computer. WPA3 uses a method closer to the enterprise model where the login keys are unique for each user.

WPA2/WPA3 is not the encryption of the data itself. Let say you tell your friend your preshared key rather than them hacking wpa2 to get it. What happens is as you log in the router and your pc generate a unique key for that session that changes everytime you connect and is different for every device that connects. These keys are the ones that are used for the actual data encryption. So what you would do is use the preshared key to decode these initial messages to get the real session keys.
Just having the preshared key does not directly let you read the data.

This is still very much corporate or government level spy stuff. It takes way too much effort to first crack the pre shared key and then listen in as someone logs in to the network to capture the actual unique encryption keys.

But to your question WPA2/WPA3 is only used when someone first connects so any difference in power usage would be insignificant as a percentage of the total use.

If you want to know how much power your router uses buy something like a kill-a-watt. This is very popular brand of devices that will measure power usages. It has many competitor lately. There are some that will let you upload historic data by hour etc.

Now other than something new to play with I suspect you will pay more for the kill-a-watt device than you would ever save since a router uses extremely small amounts of power.

With how powerful the modern cpus have become. A normal person can buy Ryzen cpu with 90 cores. It's probably very easy to crack. I used to random guess 8key password's with dual core.

I would probably buy something like kill a wat but we don't have them here. I'm going to measure the power consumption by using phones to play YouTube until death. Then compare it to wpa2. Indirectly

 

[bill001g]

With how powerful the modern cpus have become. A normal person can buy Ryzen cpu with 90 cores. It's probably very easy to crack. I used to random guess 8key password's with dual core.

I would probably buy something like kill a wat but we don't have them here. I'm going to measure the power consumption by using phones to play YouTube until death. Then compare it to wpa2. Indirectly

It is not even close to as simple as you think. The actual passwords/key are never actually send over the network. They send message encrypted with the key over the network. It still takes many years to crack simple passwords.

Again WPA2 and WPA3 are not used to encrypt the actual data.

They only encrypt the process of exchanging the keys used by the actual data encryption. The actual data encryption method is exactly the same.

So you are trying to measure some difference in power for something that happens in a tiny fraction of a second and then is never done again until the device disconnects.
The actual encryption of the rest of the data is exactly the same no matter which method you used to choose the keys.

 

[USAFRet]

With how powerful the modern cpus have become. A normal person can buy Ryzen cpu with 90 cores. It's probably very easy to crack.

If it were that easy, we'd be seeing evidence of this all over.

Since we don't....