Possible bug, saved WEP security network will try to associate with SAME SSID but wpa security network

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 04:43:20PM +0800, Zheng BaoZhong-E13358 wrote:

> I have one AP with "test" SSID, and wpapsk security.
>  
> I add one network with "test" SSID and WEP security.
>  
> >From log, AP is found by scan and wpa_supplicant tries to associate with
> AP, even the security is not matching.

Well.. That depends on how you define matching for WEP operations. If
you were to consider a legacy device that only supports WEP, it would
see the Privacy flag set in the Beacon frames and would not know
anything about WPA/RSN IE. For such a device, the security seems to be
matching its own expectations and it would likely try to associate.

An AP that advertises WPA/RSN IE could also enable WEP. I do not expect
this to be a common use case, but still, it is possible. Because of
that, just blindly refusing any network with WPA/RSN IE when configured
to use WEP may not be that good of an idea.

It is trivial to great this type of scenario in a test environment, but
does this really show up as any real world issues? The blacklist
mechanism in wpa_supplicant should allow the correct WEP network to be
found even if there are WPA/WPA2 networks using the same SSID present in
the scan results.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA