WPA2-Personal authentication instability?

[Bob Minowicz]

I have a RT-AC87U that is presently running 380.60_beta2. I moved it to the beta in hopes that it would resolve the issue originally I found under 380.59, but it appears to exist in both versions.

After an uptime of less than a day, something happens that causes WPA2-Personal authentication to fail on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios. Clients can see the SSID broadcast and attempt to associate and authenticate, but fail to do so. They either time out entirely, or get a authentication error and prompt for the pre-shared key again (even though they used the correct pre-shared key on the first attempt.) Subsequent attempts fail with the key reentered manually. A reboot of the wireless router resolves the problem for an indeterminate period of time.

In an effort to mitigate the issue to some degree, I've enabled periodic reboots so that the router is rebooted at 3AM every night. Unfortunately the problem tends to recur multiple times a day.

I did spot this post:

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/wp...hen-more-than-32-devices-are-connected.33541/

It hasn't got a reply though, and in my case, the number of devices associated is nowhere near 32 (typically it tends to be around 10, but there are a total of only 18 devices potentially on the network in the house).

I'm likely to reset the router to defaults and rebuild its configuration manually in an attempt to resolve this (on the grounds that perhaps I've enabled some setting that is causing the behavior), but I thought I should ask first if anyone else is seeing this or if the cause is known. Any help tracking the cause down would be appreciated.

 

[Bob Minowicz]

OK, I'm really scrabbling around and getting nowhere for my efforts. It looks like there's code for wpa_supplicant in the source, but I don't see it on my router. I'm guessing then that something replaced wpa_supplicant at some point, but I can't seem to figure out what. At this point, I don't even know what logs to look at. There's nothing that I'm spotting in syslog.log, but I could be staring right at it and never know. Suggestions?

 

[john9527]

Are you using a guest network that allows legacy/WEP authentication? The router has problems doing both WEP and WPA at the same time. This used to cause no connection at all for WPA, but maybe something changed in the later releases.

 

[dsring]

You could try setting the Network Key Rotation Interval to zero. Not sure if it will help. Many devices rotate the WPA or WPA2 group key (the key used for encrypting multicasts and broadcasts) after exactly an hour. As a diagnostic experiment, try setting the Network Key Rotation Interval to zero and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then you know the problem is likely the group key rotation interval,

 

[Bob Minowicz]

Are you using a guest network that allows legacy/WEP authentication? The router has problems doing both WEP and WPA at the same time. This used to cause no connection at all for WPA, but maybe something changed in the later releases.

There is a guest network, but it is also WPA2-PSK

 

[Bob Minowicz]

You could try setting the Network Key Rotation Interval to zero. Not sure if it will help. Many devices rotate the WPA or WPA2 group key (the key used for encrypting multicasts and broadcasts) after exactly an hour. As a diagnostic experiment, try setting the Network Key Rotation Interval to zero and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then you know the problem is likely the group key rotation interval,

I gave this a shot. No dice. With the key rotation interval set to 0, it still lasted less than a day.