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Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Hold on there: WPA3 connections fail after 11 hours

What a night. I hit upon something that got WPA3 working on some Raspberry Pi systems and excitedly put up a post to share the good news. Then I went away for a while, and this morning found something new: the damn things won't stay connected for more than 11 hours. All three of them failed in the same order that I changed them over.

The timeline is something like this:

01:03:51 NetworkManager [...]: new IWD device state is connected
[...]
12:04:39 iwd[...]: Received Deauthentication event, reason: 0, from_ap: false

Now that's something, considering none of the tunable aspects of the WPA3/SAE setup on my network are set to 11 hours. But, what's this? You do a search for "received deauthentication event" and "11 hours" and what do you find but a cursed Infineon developer community post on that very topic.

It's from October 2021 (!) and it's from someone who's using the same sort of chipset (Broadcom/Cypress/Infineon CYW stuff) NOT on a Pi, and they get the same "deauth" thing when on a WPA3 network. If then drop down to WPA2, it stops. The thread runs for close to a year, and then just stops cold in August 2022 with no resolution.

So, what'll it be? WPA2 mode and not being able to get onto any networks that have gone to 6E or 7, or WPA3 mode and having it fall off the network every 11 hours?

Here, I'll make a prediction: someone will say "it works most of the time, so that's fine, we won't be fixing this". Considering the level of crap people put up with in their tech these days, that'll probably be the steady-state.

My conclusion: this entire ecosystem is deeply cursed.