Wi-Fi Protected Setup

Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS; originally Wi-Fi Simple Config) is a computing standard that attempts to allow easy establishment of a secure wireless home network.

Created by the Wi-Fi Alliance and introduced in 2007, the goal of the protocol is to allow home users who know little of wireless security and may be intimidated by the available security options to set up Wi-Fi Protected Access, as well as making it easy to add new devices to an existing network without entering long passphrases. Prior to the standard, several competing solutions were developed by different vendors to address the same need.

WPS has been shown to easily fall to brute-force attacks. A major security flaw was revealed in December 2011 that affects wireless routers with the WPS feature, which most recent models have enabled by default. The flaw allows a remote attacker to recover the WPS PIN in a few hours and, with it, the network's WPA/WPA2 pre-shared key. Users have been urged to turn off the WPS feature, although this may not be possible on some router models.