entering randomly generated WPA keys

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 04:45:24PM -0700, Sam Schinke wrote:

> Cheers! This bug had me thinking my wireless card wasn't WPA
> compatible or something strange like that, since the symptoms were
> association failing at 2/4 for some particular part of the whole
> process. There were only a few pages that mentioned that this might be
> due to a mis-matched PSK, though. I'd love a more meaningful error
> message, since a mis-matched PSK would always create a failure at the
> same stage of association, no?

Yes, incorrect PSK in WPA-PSK handshake should indeed always fail by AP
disconnecting the station after small number (usually, four or so) of
round trips with msg 1/4 and 2/4. Incorrect PSK is by no means
the only reason for this kind of failure, though. Anyway, I added an
info message about possibly incorrect PSK for this case.

> wpa_passphrase has some similar issues, but that is due to shell
> expansion. Maybe a command-line option to wpa_passphrase could have it
> read a PSK directly from STDIN or a file? IE: wpa_passphrase ssid -F -
> < filename

I changed wpa_passphrase to read in the passphrase from stdin if it is
not given on the command line.

> And lastly, not to be a bore, any plans for documentation beyond that
> found in the wpa_supplicant.conf sample file? If it would help, I
> could try my hand at writing some of them, even if only to end up with
> a "man wpa_supplicant".

Yes, this is certainly on my to-do list. I would really like to see
complete user's documentation for wpa_supplicant, but this has been
delayed by other parts of the project taking my time.

Actually, I have a pending contribution of documentation (thanks!) that
can be used to generate man pages and couple of other output formats.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet gone through all the files, but I hope to
get these committed at some point. I would like to see much more
complete documentation some day, though. Something that would explain
different security modes for 802.11 networks with enough background
information to make it possible to understand what all the configuration
options mean..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA