Windows 10: Connecting to older wireless APs - this may help...

This is probably teaching people to suck eggs, but may help clear things up for some readers...

I was unable to connect to an older (backup) AP in Win10, but Win7 and my phone, tablet etc could connect no problem - these were connecting using WPA-TKIP, but MS now only allows WPA2-AES

So MS have removed the less secure WPA-TKIP protocol from W10 (this apparently started in W8), but they have left the even less secure WEP protocol in place!!!

I have now connected using WEP - on my router you can use a passphrase to create the hex pairs for the key, but you need to enter the actual hex characters as the key (eg 13 hex digit pairs = 26 characters to enter)

Looking at the wlan profile from the command line interface shows what the settings are...
netsh wlan>show profile plusnet2
Profile PlusNet2 on interface Wireless Network Connection 4:
====================================
Applied: All User Profile
Profile information
-------------------
Version : 1
Type : Wireless LAN
Name : PlusNet2
Control options :
Connection mode : Connect automatically
Network broadcast : Connect only if this network is broadcasting
AutoSwitch : Do not switch to other networks
MAC Randomization : Disabled
Connectivity settings
---------------------
Number of SSIDs : 1
SSID name : "PlusNet2"
Network type : Infrastructure
Radio type : [ Any Radio Type ]
Vendor extension : Not present
Security settings
-----------------
Authentication : Open
Cipher : WEP
Security key : Present
Key Index : 1

Looks like MS haven't completely removed WPA-TKIP: when the setting was set to WPA-TKIP the AP connected fine (the log on the Router shows that it has accepted the login passphrase credentials), but the state of the connection showed as State: Associating so it looks like W10 connects but does not complete the process

C:>netsh wlan show all
There is 1 interface on the system:
Name : Wireless Network Connection 4
Description : Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG Wireless Network Adapter
GUID : ee999a43-d489-495c-98ee-a673e36473e4
Physical address : 9c:b7:0d:1a:52:6e
State : associating
Radio status : Hardware On
Software On

:)

 

e72 connection problem

hello everyone,

my problem is when I connect to my ap it connects but after 15-20 secons my wireless network is loose itself and no page open than. but when I try to connecty to same ap with my PC it connects and also it works well. ı tryed almost everything to solve this
but I coudunt please help me in this.

 

HTC HD7 Remote desktop

Welcome Squizbiz!

Thanks for your feedback.

If you have a laptop or PC with wireless capabiltiy, you can download Microsoft's Network Monitor, and install it on that computer.

This technique won't work with every wireless AP/router, but it works with a large number of them.

After you install and run the "sniffer" software, it will want you to select your network interface. Look through the list and find your wireless adapter.

If it says that it supports "promiscuous" mode, you can use the network monitor to capture all "visible" network traffic that gets transmitted or retransmitted via your wireless access point or wireless router. Select that adapter. (If it does not support
promiscuous mode, then it will not reveal to you what you need to see.)

Begin capturing data with the Network Monitor and then turn you phone's WIFI on and attempt to connect to your wireless network.

After a minute or so, stop the capture and view the resulting data. You will likely see a whole bunch of data that may or may not make any sense to you, but you are looking for the two address columns (source and destination).

You can compare the MAC addresses from the source and destination columns to the addresses you have entered into your wireless AP/router. Try systematically entering each MAC address that are not in your router/AP one at a time until your phone is able
to connect. (Hopefully, your phone's MAC address was one of the ones shown in the captured data.)

---

Now, a very important lesson that you should learn from this technique is that it is relatively easy to find the MAC addresses of the devices that are connecting to a wide variety of wireless networks... potentially including yours.

When a person driving up and down your street uses this technique, they can determine the MAC addresses that are successfully "associating" with your wireless AP/router. With that information, they can set their wireless network adapter to use one of those
MAC addresses. (Not many phones allow you to do that, but most laptop adapters do.)

That is one way to accomplish a technique called "spoofing".

If you are not using encryption in addition to MAC filtering on your AP/router, then it is relatively easy for people to use spoofing to connect to your wireless network.

You should always use encryption on your wireless network. WPA or WPA2 is preferred, but you can use WEP if you have older wireless devices that can't use anything else.

And... If you have WPA or WPA2 encryption enabled, you can turn off MAC filtering if you want to.

I wish you well with your attempts to use your new phone!

Enjoy!

PS - The bit slapping has historically gone with the territory. It would be nice if people could comment without the insults, but there will always be one or more in a crowd, so to speak. Believe it or not, you do eventually get used to it. ;-)

 

OK, this is exactly the problem I have. I just don't understand how to fix it?

My new work PC connects fine to the work wireless, but at home, it cannot connect to the wireless AP that every other device in the home can use without an issue.

 

Hi dashbois - frustrating innit *Sad....
From my research I reckon the issue is probably (possibly) only present with older APs which only support WPA-TKIP, which I understand was removed from Win8 and is not present in Win10.

• What are you using as your home AP?
• Is your AP currently set up using WPA as the connection protocol?
• Does it have the option to use WPA2-AES? If so change the connection type on the AP: your Win10 PC should then be able to connect to it, but you'll have to re-connect your other devices as they'll have to re-negotiate their connection/passcodes.
• If your AP doesn't have the option to select WPA2-AES, you can try using the less secure WEP protocol which Win10 still supports. This uses a string of hexadecimal characters as the passcode - so a 128-bit wep key would use a 13 character hex string (26 characters), something like "61446741743258293f77616b69". Again you'd have to set up your other devices to use the same string as their passcode.

Hope this helps.....

 

Yep, I switch the AP over the WPA based on my interpretation of the earlier post and it worked a dream. but you're right, everyone else had to reconnect. It wasn't a big deal, although a few tried to make it so. So all good - was just very frustrating that Windows didn't tell me that the reason I couldn't connect was because of WEP.

Oh well. I know now.

Thanks for your help.

 

I wonder if this is the cause of many of the "can't connect to wireless" problems people are seeing when upgrading from Win 7?

 

There is more on this issue for Windows 8 here: WPA security Types are missing after upgrading to Windows 8.1

This really sucks, many times we are not in control of the routers we connect to.

 

I'm dead certain it is for Win7 upgrades, since those upgrading from Win8.x wouldn't have the issue (or would have had it some time ago when they initially got Win8.x)

It only became a problem for me where I was using an old AP as a wireless extender upstairs: my primary AP downstairs had no connection problems as it had the up-to-date prototcols.

MS very lame excuse for removing WPA-TKIP was that WPA was insecure, so they replaced it in Win8.x with WPA2 ... so if it was so insecure why on earth did they leave the even less secure WEP connection present.

Reading between the lines I reckon they realised that their implementation of WPA had their own security issues (as well as the protocol itself being insecure), so removed it rather than fixing it