Debian – How to confirm/verify WiFi is WPA2

debianlinuxwifiwpa-supplicant

How do I, from the command line, confirm on the host that the wireless network connection uses WPA2?

The wireless router is set to use WPA2 Personal (WPA2 with a pre-shared key) and AES on the network, and I have added wpa-ssid, wpa-psk and wpa-proto RSN to /etc/network/interfaces, but iwconfig prints Encryption key:off. I am running Debian Wheezy/7.0. I checked the system logs but saw nothing of relevance, and the only current wpa_supplicant.conf on my system is one for D-Bus.

Best Answer

You can check what the access point is broadcasting in its beacons by doing this (you'll need the wireless-tools package):

$ sudo iwlist wlan0 scanning

The output varies by device, and will display every SSID the interface can see. My WPA2 access point gives this (from iwlist's very verbose output):

IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
    Group Cipher : TKIP
    Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
    Authentication Suites (1) : PSK

You can also interrogate wpa_supplicant directly, which might be more what you're after:

$ sudo wpa_cli status
Selected interface 'wlan0'
bssid=c8:d7:19:01:02:03
ssid=whatever-SSID-you-are-using
id=0
mode=station
pairwise_cipher=CCMP
group_cipher=TKIP              <-- cipher
key_mgmt=WPA2-PSK              <-- key mode
wpa_state=COMPLETED
ip_address=10.20.30.4
address=88:53:2e:01:02:03
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