Station sent an invalid association request?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 11:07:10AM +0200, Otto Kek?l?inen wrote:
> The laptop is able to connect to 99% of the worlds AP's, maybe it is a
> common practise to allow graceful degradation if some station is
> misbehaving a little bit?

I find it unlikely that you can connect with that to any WPA2 APs. Some
other parsing errors could potentially be ignored, but not including an
RSN IE would not be acceptable for WPA2 association. That is the
mechanism for negotiating use of the security parameters.

> I don't think that Asus cares much about how a "bug" in an old EeePC
> 1000HE, so if you want to punish misbehaving stations in hostapd, I
> guess I must go back to my old setup? Are you sure the error is not in
> my conf, or could there be some setting in the conf to allow the EeePC
> to work?

That station is seriously broken as far as WPA2 is concerned. You cannot
cause something like this with configuration. You may be able to trigger
that bug with some configurations, but it is just not possible to use
that station with WPA2 if it sends association request frames like shown
in the sniffer trace.

> I would much rather use this new atheros card and hostapd on my home
> server than go back to using my old external Buffalo Airstation G54 as
> the WLAN AP...

Have you tried using that station with that other AP using the same WPA2
configuration?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA