Verify WPA success?

Maxim Burgerhout maxim
Wed Oct 6 02:01:23 PDT 2004


Hi,

I'm sorry I have to ask you guys a pretty n00bish question, but I don't 
know where else to turn. This WLAN stuff on Linux is all pretty new to 
me and I haven't found any serious sites concerning it yet. Apart from 
yours that is.

I recently shoved a WLAN card into my laptop and got it to work with 
ndiswrapper, which is great. Then I decided to get WEP to work and that 
proved easy too. Enabling WPA was a little (but only a little trickier, 
but only a litte: it too was set up in minutes.

Problem is, I can't seem to figure out whether my connection is now 
encrypted or not. And I'ld really like to be sure... When I do 'wpa_cli 
status' I get this:

bssid=so:me:nu:mb:er:he:re
ssid=HomeNet
pairwise_cipher=TKIP
group_cipher=TKIP
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_state=COMPLETED
Supplicant PAE state=AUTHENTICATED
heldPeriod=60
authPeriod=30
startPeriod=30
maxStart=3
suppPortStatus=Authorized
portControl=Auto
Supplicant Backend state=IDLE
EAP state=SUCCESS
reqMethod=0
selectedMethod=0
methodState=NONE
decision=COND_SUCC
ClientTimeout=60

Can someone tell me:
 a. why 'Supplicant Backend state' is always IDLE, even if I download 
some hughe file
 b. why 'decision' says COND_SUCC? Does this mean 'conditional success'? 
Conditional in what meaning? Do I need to do something else to get it to 
say 'SUCC'? Or is this ok?
 c. why does wpa_supplicant never show up on the top of my 'top' list? 
When I download some large files, and hence some heavy encryption should 
be in progress, shouldn't this process consume at least some cpu cycles 
and pop to the top of 'top' every now and then?

I followed the instructions in the README file in the tarball, and set 
up a pre-shared key. From what I make from the -dd output when I start 
wpa_supplicant, this works. Do I need to post my -dd output?

When I figure out what these messages in 'wpa_cli status' mean, I'll 
post it to some forums, so other people won't bother you ;)

Thanks,

Max




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