User's Manual

9
Extensible Authentication Protocols (EAP). Currently, the ZXP Series 8 printer only supports
Personal mode.
For WPA or WPA2 Personal, a single, 8 – 63 character passphrase is entered into the access
point. The same passphrase must be entered into the printer. The access point and printer each
derive the same 32 byte PSK from the passphrase using the password-based key derivation
function 2 (PBKDF2) from RFC 2898. The importance of picking a secure passphrase cannot be
overstressed. The most prevalent security attack against WPA-PSK is a brute force dictionary attack,
using a list of common words to “guess” your passphrase. So a passphrase like “darthvader” could result
in your security being quickly compromised. When constructing your passphrase, keep the following
suggestions in mind:
• Use more than 8 characters. The more characters, the more secure.
• Use a combination of uppercase, lower case, numeric and punctuation characters.
• Use random characters, avoid using recognizable words.
Media access control address authentication
Some WLAN vendors support authentication based on the physical address, or MAC address, of
the client Network Interface Card (NIC). In this scenario, an access point allows association by a
client only if that client’s MAC address matches an address in an authentication table used by
the access point. This is not configurable through the printer.