Rehan

Do we need to specify key_mgmt while configuring wifi?

Hello,

I was working with VintageNet to configure the wlan. We can configure the wifi network using VintageNetWiFi.quick_configure() or VintageNet.configure(). I’m able to configure using both.
I checked that when i use quick_configure(), key_mgmt is set to :wpa_psk.
When i use configure() i have set the key_mgmt if i don’t set it to :wpa_psk or any other key management, I observed it defaults to :none.

Now my requirement is to be able connect to any network WPA2, WPA3, or transitional WPA2/WPA3, without specifying the key_mgmt type.

Regards

10 comments

/nerves #vintage_net #vintage_net_wifi

0 2032 10

2024-03-01 13:32:18 UTC

First Post!

fhunleth

Co-author of Nerves

WPA3 can be made to work with VintageNetWiFi, but we don’t have a read-to-go configuration. The main reason has been, amazingly, lack of interest. I think that it stems from WPA3 not being supported on the Raspberry Pi 3. (Every time I type this, I can’t believe it could still be the case, so if you know that it works now, please correct me.)

One thing to keep in mind with VintageNetWiFi is that it “just” converts configurations expressed as Elixir terms to wpa_supplicant configurations. That means that anything doable with wpa_supplicant can be done with VintageNetWiFi. Sometimes we need to update VintageNetWiFi to properly expose a feature, but the process is primarily one of converting data structures rather than actually implementing a WiFi feature.

If you look midway down at README — vintage_net_wifi v0.12.9, you can see the configurations for WPA3 and transitional WPA2/WPA3. I don’t know of an all-in-one configuration for the wpa_supplicant to do everything with one configuration. If you find one, it could be adapted to VintageNetWiFi and I’d be very interested in doing that.

The workarounds that I can think of:

Scan for networks, find the AP you want, check it’s parameters and save the config accordingly. I don’t like this since it won’t handle hidden networks and if someone changes the AP’s settings, you’ll have to reconfigure. I know this will work, though.
Send down three configurations for the same SSID in the :networks key. One is the WPA3 config, the next is the transitional config and the last is the WPA2 config. This should make wpa_supplicant try each one and stick with the one that works.

If option 2 works and doesn’t break with hardware that doesn’t support WPA3, I’d interested in updating VintageNetWiFi.quick_configure to do that.

Post #1

Most Liked

fhunleth

Co-author of Nerves

My previous response isn’t right.

The way to do this is to list all of the key_mgmt types that are ok. The current VintageNetWiFi release doesn’t support that. I started a PR with support at Support creating WPA2/WPA3 configurations by fhunleth · Pull Request #217 · nerves-networking/vintage_net_wifi · GitHub.

Another issue is that I don’t think any of the officially supported Nerves hardware have WiFi modules that support WPA3. I just confirmed that we can’t test WPA3 on any of the Raspberry Pis. This blog post had good links on the work being done.

Do you have a WiFi module that supports WPA3? I’ve tested the PR with a WiFi module that supports WPA3, so the PR seems to work. Confirming that it works with whatever hardware you have would be nice to know if that’s possible.

Post #2

Rehan

@fhunleth Yes we figured out the problem, the reason we’re unable to connect to WPA3 network is because of the wifi chip firmware, I haven’t yet tried updating it, after updating the firmware i’ll check it.

Post #10