I was thinking of generating a WPA-PSK passphrase, and I see in the OpenBSD manpage for wpa-psk(8)
:
The passphrase must be a sequence of between 8 and 63
ASCII-encoded characters.
What exactly is the criteria for "ASCII-encoded" here? Just that they must be 8-bit chars with the high bit unset? Are non-printable characters allowed?
Come to think of it… Does my approach of randomly generating a passphrase make any sense? Would it be better to just generate 64 random bytes and use that as a key?
Best Answer
> What exactly is the criteria for "ASCII-encoded" here? Just that they must be 8-bit chars with the high bit unset? Are non-printable characters allowed?
Wikipedia's Wi-Fi Protected Access says the WPA-PSK passphrase is 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters, and includes this reference as a footnote:
> Come to think of it... Does my approach of randomly generating a passphrase make any sense? Would it be better to just generate 64 random bytes and use that as a key?
> I think I'll still just generate 256 bits using a secure RNG...
Does your wireless router and every device you want to connect to your wireless network let you manually enter the WPA-PSK key as 64 hex characters? If not, then you may have to use an ASCII passphrase to be able to enter it in all of your devices.