WPA3 landed in 2018. In tech years, that is ancient. It fixed a lot of what was wrong with WPA2, then quietly exposed a fresh batch of problems nobody fully solved. So while there is no official WPA4 on the calendar yet, it is worth asking what the next standard actually needs to get right.
I have spent enough time staring at router admin pages to have opinions. Here is my wishlist for whatever comes next, and why each item matters more than it sounds.
First, what WPA3 already got right
Credit where it is due. WPA3 replaced the creaky old handshake with SAE, which killed the offline password-guessing attack that made weak WPA2 passwords trivial to crack. It made Protected Management Frames mandatory, which blocks a chunk of the deauthentication attacks people use to kick you off a network. It added Enhanced Open, so even password-free coffee shop Wi-Fi gets basic encryption instead of broadcasting everything in the clear.
Good upgrades, all of them. The problem is what they left on the table.
What WPA4 Needs To Fix
1. Kill the shared password
The single biggest weakness in home Wi-Fi is the thing on the sticky note on your router: one password that everyone shares. It gets written on whiteboards, texted to guests, and never changed. The rest of the security world is moving to passkeys and certificates, where each device proves who it is without a shared secret floating around. Home Wi-Fi is overdue for the same treatment. Imagine onboarding a device with a tap and a cryptographic key instead of squinting at a 16-character string.
2. Build in post-quantum key exchange
WPA3’s handshake still relies on elliptic curve math that a future quantum computer could unwind. NIST already finalised post-quantum standards in 2024. Any serious next-generation Wi-Fi standard needs to bake those in from day one rather than bolting them on later. This is the kind of thing that is painful to retrofit and easy to design in early.
3. Solve IoT onboarding for real
Your smart bulb does not have a keyboard. So manufacturers cut corners: default passwords, open setup modes, sketchy companion apps that want every permission on your phone. A huge share of network compromises start with one badly secured gadget. WPA4 should define a clean, secure way to add a screenless device to a network without leaving a hole open during setup.
4. Close the downgrade loophole
Most networks run a mixed mode that supports both WPA2 and WPA3 so older devices still connect. Attackers love this, because they can force a connection down to the weaker standard and attack that instead. The Dragonblood research back in 2019 showed exactly how. The next standard needs a cleaner way to refuse a downgrade without bricking your decade-old printer.
5. Make the evil twin pointless
A rogue access point that clones your network name can still trick devices into connecting. WPA3 helps, but it does not fully solve mutual authentication for home users the way enterprise certificates do. If your laptop could verify it is talking to your router and not a clone in a backpack across the street, an entire category of attacks disappears.
The Realistic Prediction
Here is what I actually expect, as opposed to what I want. The Wi-Fi Alliance rarely launches a clean new number out of nowhere. More likely, the good stuff arrives as incremental updates to WPA3 first, post-quantum key exchange in one revision, better device onboarding in another, and a formal WPA4 label only shows up once enough has changed to justify the marketing.
The timeline will be slow because Wi-Fi has to keep talking to billions of existing devices. That printer from 2014 is the reason your network security moves at the speed of the oldest gadget you refuse to throw away.
What To Do While You Wait
You do not get to vote on the standard, but you can stack the deck. Run WPA3 if your hardware allows it. Put your smart-home junk on a separate guest network so a hacked doorbell cannot reach your laptop. Change the default password on every device that has one. And buy a router from a brand that ships firmware updates for years, not months, because that is how the next standard will reach you.
WPA4 will get here eventually. The habits above keep you safe in the gap, which, knowing how Wi-Fi standards move, could be a long one.
