Re: How to find out if my WLAN uses WPA or WPA2 security?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2013-06-19 at 09:37 +0200, Paul Menzel wrote:
> Dear NetworkManager folks,
>
>
> following a discussion on the linux-wireless list [1], I want to find
> out if my WLAN uses WPA(1) or WPA2 security. In his reply Larry Finger
> suggests to use `iwlist scan` but I do want to avoid installing the
> package containing this and wonder if NetworkManager exposes the same
> information.
>
> In the connection properties (Verbindungsinformationen) in `nm-applet`,
> the security line tells me WPA/WPA2.
>
> I also was not able to find this in the output of nmcli.
>
>         $ LANG=C nmcli dev wifi list
>         SSID                              BSSID               MODE             FREQ       RATE       SIGNAL 
>   SECURITY   ACTIVE  
>         […]   
>         'MYWLAN'                          XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX   Infrastructure   2457 MHz   54 MB/s    46     
>   WPA WPA2   yes
>         […]
>
> Does NetworkManager not know about this information because
> wpa_supplicant is responsible for this?

If nmcli says "WPA WPA2" then your AP supports both versions of WPA and
can accept clients that are not capable of WPA2.  You'll get this same
information from 'iwlist scan' or anywhere else.

What you're probably wondering is whether your actual connection is
using WPA2 *right now*, and the answer is that yes, it is.
NetworkManager tells the supplicant to use the best available protocol,
so if the AP is capable of WPA2 then that's what the connection is
using.

Dan

(of course, if your card doesn't support WPA2 then it won't be using it,
but everything supports WPA2 now, so this is quite unlikely)