Protected WLAN

[JD]

On 05/23/11 15:41, Tim Smith wrote:
> On Monday 23 May 2011 22:26:49 JD wrote:
>> On 05/23/11 12:22, Tim Smith wrote:
>>> On Monday 23 May 2011 17:50:50 JD wrote:
>>>> On 05/23/11 09:28, Tim Smith wrote:
>>>>> On Monday 23 May 2011 16:36:00 Tim wrote:
>>>>> Not really. This is SSID, not BSSID (BSSID is usually the MAC of the
>>>>> AP). When you scan, you not only listen for beacons, but you (should)
>>>>> send probe requests. If you put an SSID into your probe request, you
>>>>> will get a response only from a BSS with a matching SSID, so you
>>>>> broadcast saying "network named 'MyHouseNetwork' please respond" at
>>>>> which point you get the response from the real BSS which has the real
>>>>> SSID in it and not the bogus one that went in the beacons.
>>>> Well, I have placed wpa_supplicant in full debug verbosity
>>>> output mode, and it's probe/scan does not seem to be aimed
>>>> at just my router. In fact it gets usually 3 to 5 responses
>>>> from which it then selects my AP.
>>>> The wpa_supplicant.conf has the SSID and the BSSID in the
>>>> configuration. So, how come the probe/scan gets more than
>>>> one response?
>>> Well, note I said "If" :-)
>>>
>>> If you do not place ANY SSID into the probe request, then all networks
>>> will respond. Depending on the configuration of a multi-SSID AP you may
>>> see more than one probe response from the same MAC address in this case.
>>> Or not. That may be up to the guy who runs the network(s) or it may be a
>>> hard-coded behaviour of the APs being used.
>>>
>>> See the scan_ssid parameter for wpa_supplicant for how to change
>>> wpa_supplicant's behaviour in this respect.
>> You did not show the part where I said that
>> my router's BSSID and the nets SSID are in
>> wpa_supplicant.conf.
>> So, I am asking how come the wpa_supplicant
>> is not aiming it's probe directly at that BSSID
>> and SSID coded in the config file? It seems to
>> me that it should do that.
> I wrote:
>>> See the scan_ssid parameter for wpa_supplicant for how to change
>>> wpa_supplicant's behaviour in this respect.
> Seriously. wpa_supplicant won't do that unless you change that parameter.
> Though of course you don't say whether that parameter is set, so you might
> have it set and I didn't know that, in which case it seems like you might have
> found a bug in wpa_supplicant (I'm assuming you have a sniffer trace of the
> probe request off the air to verify this. Call me old-fashioned and paranoid
> but I never *quite* trust a program's own debug output without independent
> verification :-)
>
> > From /usr/share/doc/wpa_supplicant-0.6.8/wpa_supplicant.conf:
>
> # scan_ssid:
> #       0 = do not scan this SSID with specific Probe Request frames (default)
> #       1 = scan with SSID-specific Probe Request frames (this can be used to
> #           find APs that do not accept broadcast SSID or use multiple SSIDs;
> #           this will add latency to scanning, so enable this only when
> needed)
>
My conf file for my net has
scan_ssid=1

So, does that mean it will/will not send the ssid as part of the probe?