Bug 2226569 - wpa_supplicant does not support for WPA3 for Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets
Summary: wpa_supplicant does not support for WPA3 for Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: wpa_supplicant
Version: rawhide
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Linux
unspecified
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Davide Caratti
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2023-07-26 01:33 UTC by Neal Gompa
Modified: 2023-11-09 01:12 UTC (History)
11 users (show)

Fixed In Version: wpa_supplicant-2.10-8.fc39 wpa_supplicant-2.10-8.fc40
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2023-09-21 00:15:56 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Neal Gompa 2023-07-26 01:33:50 UTC
Description of the problem:
Currently, wpa_supplicant can't support WPA3 with Wi-Fi modules that use the brcmfmac driver.

This is because the driver only supports offload mode, which wpa_supplicant currently does not support.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Attempt to connect to a Wi-Fi network that requires WPA3 auth

Actual Results:  
Fail to connect

Expected Results:  
Authenticate and connect properly

Additional info:
There is a patch set that resolves the problem: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2023-July/041653.html

It would be ideal if this patch set was backported to Fedora 38 as well for the Fedora Asahi Remix to benefit from it.

Comment 1 Hector Martin 2023-08-10 02:52:05 UTC
Note that this is a blocker for shipping Fedora Asahi Remix (we'd like to do that by the end of the month). We need to offer WPA3 support; the other option is to switch from wpa_supplicant to iwd (which does support this), but iwd comes with its own set of bugs and issues.

Comment 2 Davide Caratti 2023-08-11 15:24:13 UTC
(In reply to Hector Martin from comment #1)
> Note that this is a blocker for shipping Fedora Asahi Remix (we'd like to do
> that by the end of the month). We need to offer WPA3 support; the other
> option is to switch from wpa_supplicant to iwd (which does support this),
> but iwd comes with its own set of bugs and issues.

hello, these 2 patches are not yet applied to the upstream project. Can we wait until they are reviewed and applied?
thanks,
-- 
davide

Comment 3 Neal Gompa 2023-08-12 02:39:55 UTC
(In reply to Davide Caratti from comment #2)
> (In reply to Hector Martin from comment #1)
> > Note that this is a blocker for shipping Fedora Asahi Remix (we'd like to do
> > that by the end of the month). We need to offer WPA3 support; the other
> > option is to switch from wpa_supplicant to iwd (which does support this),
> > but iwd comes with its own set of bugs and issues.
> 
> hello, these 2 patches are not yet applied to the upstream project. Can we
> wait until they are reviewed and applied?
> thanks,
> -- 
> davide

I'm not sure we can. Having WPA3 not working is a pretty significant impairment for networking Macs.

Are any of the maintainers of wpa_supplicant able to review the patches upstream to help get them applied?

Comment 4 Fedora Release Engineering 2023-08-16 08:08:03 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 39 development cycle.
Changing version to 39.

Comment 5 Dan Williams 2023-08-20 01:50:16 UTC
@marcan Jouni usually gets around to it, but it's often in batches. Not surprised that it's been a month since Daisuke posted; Jouni did review some things last week at least.

Not that I'm a maintainer, but I had one question on the patch, otherwise looks fairly sane to me.

Comment 6 Davide Cavalca 2023-08-30 14:33:37 UTC
Put up a naive backport of this at https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/wpa_supplicant/pull-request/20 to ease testing.

Comment 7 Neal Gompa 2023-09-11 03:29:32 UTC
Could we please get this PR landed in Fedora? Our list of blockers for the GA release of Fedora Asahi Remix is quickly getting whittled down and I would *really* like to have this resolved.

Comment 8 Davide Caratti 2023-09-14 07:14:16 UTC
(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #7)
> Could we please get this PR landed in Fedora? Our list of blockers for the
> GA release of Fedora Asahi Remix is quickly getting whittled down and I
> would *really* like to have this resolved.

hello Neal, and Davide,

the problem with merging that patch is that it potentially creates problems on configurations where SAE offload is used with password ID (see https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2023-August/041717.html). Maybe we should be cautious of not breaking the functionality for other NICs / preserve a consistent behavior. It's not a big deal, since NL80211_EXT_FEATURE_SAE_OFFLOAD is only enabled on Broadcom chipsets according to [1] at the moment.


[1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.6-rc1/C/ident/NL80211_EXT_FEATURE_SAE_OFFLOAD

Comment 9 Hector Martin 2023-09-14 08:13:48 UTC
Yeah, that seems like a really minor corner case. As far as I can tell the NL80211 offload API doesn't support that feature, and probably neither does our firmware, so we can't support it anyway. It probably makes sense to have that discussion upstream and handle it more cleanly, but I doubt another driver is going to grow the offload feature in the window while that is sorted out, and meanwhile we have no WPA3 at all and user complaints flowing in (the latest "WPA3 doesn't work" bug report we got was just yesterday), so I'd really much rather pick up the patches as-is for now and bikeshed the details later...

Comment 10 Fedora Update System 2023-09-15 09:25:20 UTC
FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 39. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762

Comment 11 Fedora Update System 2023-09-16 01:48:05 UTC
FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762 has been pushed to the Fedora 39 testing repository.
Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command:
`sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762`
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.

Comment 12 Fedora Update System 2023-09-21 00:15:56 UTC
FEDORA-2023-ab6ea95762 has been pushed to the Fedora 39 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 13 Fedora Update System 2023-11-08 19:09:25 UTC
FEDORA-2023-d031eaff09 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 40. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-d031eaff09

Comment 14 Fedora Update System 2023-11-09 01:12:34 UTC
FEDORA-2023-d031eaff09 has been pushed to the Fedora 40 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.


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