android phone often needs reboot to authenticate with 802.11ac AP

[Bruno Dantas]

Hi, Jouni.

The problem happened again today. It seems random and unprovoked. There seems to be nothing I can do to trigger it.

To have a log of a successful authentication to look at as a baseline, I saved this one from yesterday. I started logging, then at exactly 21:32 I toggled wifi off and back on on the phone:

Excerpt from wpa_supplicant log successful authentication at 21:32:

08-27 21:32:04.838 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: Trying to associate with SSID 'bibliotheca_alexandrina'
08-27 21:32:04.879 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: Associated with 00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c
08-27 21:32:04.879 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SUBNET-STATUS-UPDATE status=0
08-27 21:32:05.185 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: WPA: RX message 1 of 4-Way Handshake from 00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c (ver=2)
08-27 21:32:05.188 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: WPA: Sending EAPOL-Key 2/4
08-27 21:32:05.191 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: WPA: RX message 3 of 4-Way Handshake from 00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c (ver=2)
08-27 21:32:05.191 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: WPA: Sending EAPOL-Key 4/4
08-27 21:32:05.207 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c [PTK=CCMP GTK=CCMP]
08-27 21:32:05.207 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c completed [id=0 id_str=%7B%22configKey%22%3A%22%5C%22bibliotheca_alexandrina%5C%22WPA_PSK%22%2C%22creatorUid%22%3A%221000%22%7D]
08-27 21:32:05.652 31387 31387 I wpa_supplicant: p2p0: CTRL-EVENT-AVOID-FREQ ranges=5180-5320,5540-5660

(Full log of successful authentication at 21:32 is here: https://pastebin.com/ZvvLFwy3)

Sometimes the problem strikes my phone, sometimes my wife's. The phones are not usually affected at the same time. Both phones are OnePlus5 running LineageOS 16 (based on AOSP 9). 

Here is an excerpt from wpa_supplicant log for a failed authentication attempt at exactly 21:18 (note: the phone that failed authentication was successfully authenticated earlier in the day). Only way to get this phone to successfully authenticate with my 5 GHz 802.11ac AP again will be to reboot the phone. Note that we never had any problems using all same hardware and software when hostapd was running at 5 GHz 802.11n.

08-28 21:18:04.969  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: Trying to associate with SSID 'bibliotheca_alexandrina'
08-28 21:18:08.074  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c status_code=1
08-28 21:18:11.282  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: Trying to associate with SSID 'bibliotheca_alexandrina'
08-28 21:18:14.383  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c status_code=1
08-28 21:18:17.989  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: Trying to associate with SSID 'bibliotheca_alexandrina'
08-28 21:18:21.089  3153  3153 I wpa_supplicant: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:c0:ca:b1:09:0c status_code=1

(Full log of failed authentication at 21:18: https://pastebin.com/nT1Mmsg7)

Any idea what I can do to prevent this kind of authentication failure?