WPA failing to associate OK with Intersil chipset (redux)

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 07:10:03PM +0000, Alex Pounds wrote:

> I'm not entirely sure that the wifi card has the hardware to support WPA,
> so that would probably be a good thing to check. Presuming that it does,
> however, let me outline the current symptoms and see if anyone has any
> bright ideas. 

Well, I don't know whether I would call it hardware support for WPA, but
all Prism2/2.5/3 cards should work with WPA if they are using new enough
station firmware (v1.7.x or newer). Most of the WPA related
functionality is implemented in the driver/supplicant, though.

> The (abridged) dmesg log shows that my card flip-flops between associating
> and non-associating (as well as having a weird thing for a 44:44:44
> address): 

That 44:44:44:44:44:44 address is just the default address that the
firmware uses when it is not associated with any AP.
> 
> eth0: Trying to join BSSID 00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx
> eth0: LinkStatus=1 (Connected)
> eth0: LinkStatus: BSSID=00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx

This should indicate that the firmware was able to complete association.

> I've stuck a log of the wpa_supplicant output at
> http://www.ethicsgirls.com/stuff/wifilog.txt . This was run by doing: 

This is somewhat confusing:

0: 00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx ssid='ourwifi' wpa_ie_len=0 rsn_ie_len=0 caps=0x11
   skip - no WPA/RSN IE

The first scan result comes with no WPA or RSN(WPA2) being advertised..

0: 00:16:b6:xx:xx:xx ssid='ourwifi' wpa_ie_len=0 rsn_ie_len=22 caps=0x11
   selected based on RSN IE

But the second scan shows WPA2 being advertised..

Rest of the log shows successful associations happening with the AP, but
no EAPOL frames (the key handshake for WPA2) are received. Based on this
information, I do not know what could be causing such behavior. Would
you by any chance be able to capture the 802.11 packets exchanged during
the authentication attempt with a wireless sniffer? That would be the
best way of getting more information to figure out what exactly is
happening here.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA