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I am doing some research on WiFi for my school and one question I want to answer is what encryption is the most used. One day it was of course WEP and now it is WPA2 I assume, but it would be great if someone knows a recent source with percentages.

Ruben
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    WEP has been deprecated and IIRC WPA is maintained only for compatibility reasons. I don't think you can get accurate enough statistics as most wireless networks are personal. I'm voting to close this post as the answers would be only opinion based – Mr. E Dec 27 '16 at 17:22
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    Don't close the question. I've provided actual survey information below; and people may find it enlightening (and disturbing) to know that almost 10% of networks still use WEP! – John Deters Dec 27 '16 at 19:25
  • @JohnDeters A correct answer will change in the future so it's not a good fit for the site. – Arminius Dec 27 '16 at 22:37
  • @Arminius How can I edit my question so that it fits in this community? Or is there just no way? – Ruben Dec 28 '16 at 10:18
  • @ Arminius In my eyes the WiGLE.net source seems prett good? It also updates over time. (sorry for the two comments, I can not edit) – Ruben Dec 28 '16 at 10:19

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WiGLE.net is a site where people upload information about WiFi access points they've discovered. It's not complete, but it's a very large survey that should at least show you the trends you are interested in. This table is from their current stats page:

Wireless Encryption

WPA2: 171,834,316 (56.37%)
WPA: 23,980,785 (7.87%)
WEP: 29,492,258 (9.68%)
????: 60,103,751 (19.72%)
None: 19,818,038 (6.50%)
John Deters
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  • I'm interested in the fact that 6% use nothing .... – schroeder Dec 27 '16 at 19:45
  • @schroeder I bet most of them offer very limited internet access (just DNS) and have a captive portal to pay up. – Navin Dec 27 '16 at 21:13
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    @schroeder, the majority of unencrypted networks in my area are either "xfinitywifi" or the automatic "guest" network built in to a bunch of routers. In either case, it's a captive-portal system. – Mark Dec 27 '16 at 21:35
  • @Mark ah yes, hadn't thought of captive portals. – schroeder Dec 27 '16 at 21:44
  • If you look at the map, there seem to be lots of samples from the sea, and some of them track a path. Are ship-mounted access points being over-represented in the resulting statistics? And what about home access points in predominantly residential areas, worldwide? I really am not sure how much faith to put into these data. – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 27 '16 at 22:20
  • @schroeder Here, in the country I live, on the south, we have a few hotspots with free WiFi.It's not very good, but it is free, Anyone can access. I bet that a good portion of those are these public hotspots for people to access. Adding a password would be a huge usability burden. – Ismael Miguel Dec 27 '16 at 22:49
  • @LightnessRacesinOrbit, I wouldn't put 100% faith in any volunteered data of this size. I'm sure it contains plenty of data including mobile phone access points and personal hot spots, too. However, some bad data doesn't invalidate all of the data, and so it remains one of the best sources of information available. – John Deters Dec 28 '16 at 01:09
  • @JohnDeters: Knowing that there are bad data in the set casts doubt on the reliability of any of the data, unless we have a way to distinguish between the two. :) – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 28 '16 at 14:30
  • @LightnessRacesinOrbit, WiGLE attempts to identify and remove imperfect data, but that's much easier said than done. So if they could distinguish them in an automated fashion, they would, and we wouldn't see the noise. But that's incredibly hard to do. Does that mean we completely ignore the data that may be of value? I'm straying into philosophy here, but as humans, we would die of paralysis if we decided nothing until we were assured of perfect data. The way to proceed is to make a decision based on the data we have, even knowing it's partially imperfect, then move forward anyway. – John Deters Dec 28 '16 at 14:55
  • @JohnDeters: I guess I'd be more comfortable using the data if I had a higher level of certainty of _how_ it's flawed, so that I could take that into account when drawing my conclusions. Arguably, using known-flawed data to draw conclusions is worse than not using it at all and then having to postpone those conclusions. We wouldn't "die of paralysis" — we'd refocus our energies into determining what conclusions we _can_ draw given what we know. I'm new to WiGLE, so perhaps you do have a good feel for that. :) – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 28 '16 at 15:03