Wi-Fi Direct Vs. Bluetooth

To counter wi-fi direct, it bluetooth V4.0.
Bluetooth V4.0 comes with higher range and bandwidth. The biggest advantage is that it is very light on the battery. It can run on a button cell battery for more than a year. The bandwidth is around 24Mbit/s. Apart from these advances, it is not backward compatible. that is older devices need new hardware for this new version.

Wi-fi direct on the other hand can be implemented in older devices with just a software upgrade. It gives a massive bandwidth of 250 Mb/s and a whooping range of 200 meters. But the only disadvantage seems to be the power it draws (around 100mW). But when considering the range and bandwidth, the little high power consumption seems to fade off.

wi-fi being included in many of the latest handhelds and portables, might become a standard soon and wipe off Bluetooth over time, just as Infrared was by bluetooth.

the main disadvantage of Wi-Fi is that it can be easily hacked by the hackers, the security methods now is WEP (Wired equivalent of privacy). The new VAN (Virtual Private Network) corrects everything that is wrong with WEP.
the main advantage of Wi-Fi is that it is several times faster than bluetooth

WPA-2, I've heard is very difficult to break into. Don't know much about it though. Communications folks may shed more light 😀

The_Big_KWPA-2, I've heard is very difficult to break into. Don't know much about it though. Communications folks may shed more light 😀

Yes,the more secure WPA-2 using Advanced Encryption standard was introduced in 2004 and is supported by most new Wi-fi devices. WPA-2 is more compatible with WPA

For a normal user, wifi is way too faster than bluetooth and wifi direct is backward compatible. And wifi offers a larger field. So the choice obviously is wifi direct. It might be a bit heavy on the battery, but that can be neglected. Most normal users, I think, are not concerned about security. But again, WPA-II makes it more secure.

Guys, Let me through some light on wireless security.
WEP is a basic level of encryption and breaking it will take 5 minutes if the traffic on wireless device is high.
However "WPA-2 is very secure" may not be correct way to frame it. WPA-2 has two modes of operation,
1. Personal mode
2. Enterprise mode

Most of us on day-to-day basis uses WPA2 in personal mode that is PSK mode and is not secure.Also Enterprise mode is also vulnerable if not configured with caution.If you have proper hardware you can break them.

Enterprise wpa2 is secure as compared to other was of securing wireless networks.

@Rahul: I see several unsecured networks in my area. Do you think WPA2 is 'easy' to crack? (Meaning, using tools and simple tricks?).

It is not difficult to break into the wpa2 system. However with the proper hardware and software tools in place. The best way to handle insecure network is to use encryption at upper layers such as https, SSH.

Does anyone have idea about Aircrack-ng? Aircrack-ng is an 802.11 WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK key cracking program.

Aircrack-ng can recover the WEP key once enough encrypted packets have been captured with airodump-ng. This part of the aircrack-ng suite determines the WEP key using two fundamental methods. The first method is via the PTW approach (Pyshkin, Tews, Weinmann). The default cracking method is PTW. This is done in two phases. In the first phase, aircrack-ng only uses ARP packets. If the key is not found, then it uses all the packets in the capture. Please remember that not all packets can be used for the PTW method.