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Will the performance of my home wireless network be affected by an overly long WPA2-PSK passphrase?

Is the passphrase used only during authentication or is it used to encrypt all frames?

Nathan Fellman
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2 Answers2

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WPA2 provides AES encryption on your data. The key for this encryption is generated for each session and has no relationship to your passphrase. Your passphrase is really only used for authentication.

Your passphrase will have no affect on your performance.

Source

th3dude
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"If ASCII characters are used, the 256 bit key is calculated by applying the PBKDF2 key derivation function to the passphrase, using the SSID as the salt and 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1" The actual protecting codes have set sizes.

Wikipedia

tobylane
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    just in case i missed it .. did you answer the question? – akira Jan 20 '11 at 14:53
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    It means that regardless of the ASCII password, the calculated key is always the same number of bits (256). So the length of the password is irrelevant to performance. – Ryan C. Thompson Jan 20 '11 at 15:12