It's been known for years that the Wired Equivalent Privacy or WEP (define) protocol is easily broken, and that to be secure, wireless networks should use the more powerful protocol called Wi-Fi Protected Access, or WPA.

Now security experts say they've proven that WPA can be breached just as easily. A pair of researchers in Japan said that they developed a way to break WPA encryption in about one minute -- and will show how at a conference there next month.

WPA's viability has been in doubt since late 2008, when security researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews demonstrated the ability to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) that provides WPA security within 15 minutes.

Now, Researchers Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University said they've improved on that. The pair has already discussed their findings in a paper presented at the Joint Workshop on Information Security held in Taiwan earlier this month and will discuss it again at a Sept. 25 event in Hiroshima.