WEP not supported anymore?

Support Network
1

Reasonable new to Linux, and just trying to help out a bit with what I found out.

So in a rental apartment, the owner thought it’s modern to use WEP as WiFi encryption. Android and Windows warn about bad security, Manjaro doesn’t connect at all. Somewhere I can accept that option :slight_smile: On the other side, it took me a while to figure out why.

The error stated wpa_supplicant failed. A little dig further, I came across the changelog: https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/plain/wpa_supplicant/ChangeLog where they state:
" * removed WEP support from the default build (CONFIG_WEP=y can be used
to enable it, if really needed)"

NetworkManager automatically switches to WEP, so from the ‘front’ it looks like WEP support is there, but in the ‘back’ it’s not anymore.

Maybe this can this be fixed by Manjaro, by building wpa_supplicant with the CONFIG_WEP=y option?

1 Like
2

You can build it yourself.
All you need is here. Just edit wpa_supplicant_config.

2 Likes
3

No need for building it.

EDIT: Turns out one must build it with the option enabled.

Just copy /usr/share/doc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to /etc/wpa_supplicant/ and edit it there.

1 Like
5

Thanks for your replies. I tried copying the wpa conf first, because it sounded like the easier, faster sollution. I’ve added “CONFIG_WEP=y” to that file, and made a new network block

CONFIG_WEP=y

 # Attempt to make WEP wifi to work in Rental house
 network={
 	ssid="free_verholle_EXT"
 	key_mgmt=NONE
 	wep_key0="0623872596"
 	wep_key1=0623872596
 	wep_tx_keyidx=0
 	priority=5
 	auth_alg=SHARED
 	CONFIG_WEP=y
 }

Obviously I might be doing it wrong, but both didn’t do much.
Shouldn’t it really be rebuild? As they’ve moved WEP support to a build option, which is disabled by default. And they even state it’s going to be removed in total in the future.

# Wired equivalent privacy (WEP)
# WEP is an obsolete cryptographic data confidentiality algorithm that is not
# considered secure. It should not be used for anything anymore. The
# functionality needed to use WEP is available in the current wpa_supplicant
# release under this optional build parameter. This functionality is subject to
# be completely removed in a future release.
#CONFIG_WEP=y

Source: svntogit-packages/wpa_supplicant_config at packages/wpa_supplicant · archlinux/svntogit-packages · GitHub line 615+

I try rebuilding next. (and sent a message to the owner to change the freaking WiFi…)

6

Revisiting this I think you actually do need to rebuild it.

PKGBUILD:

cp "$srcdir/wpa_supplicant_config" ./.config

wpa_supplicant_config:

# Wired equivalent privacy (WEP)
# WEP is an obsolete cryptographic data confidentiality algorithm that is not
# considered secure. It should not be used for anything anymore. The
# functionality needed to use WEP is available in the current wpa_supplicant
# release under this optional build parameter. This functionality is subject to
# be completely removed in a future release.
#CONFIG_WEP=y

Makefile:

CONFIG_FILE=.config
...
ifdef CONFIG_WEP
CFLAGS += -DCONFIG_WEP
endif
7

Ah, you’re right. Apparently I didn’t look very closely.