WPA key with ASCII extended chars

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Level 1

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WPA key with ASCII extended chars

Hi,

first of all, sorry my english.

I want to connect to a WPA wifi connection with my iPhone 4 but is impossible. My WPA key include ASCII extended chars as "¿","ñ" or "á" to give more security to my network and my iPhone says all the time "Impossible to join". I can connect with all my computers and other mobile phones.

If I remove all this characters, I can connect without problems with my iPhone.

It is a bug or a limitation from iOS? Is possible make a request to Apple to fix this?

Thanks!

iPhone 4, iOS 4

Posted on Mar 17, 2011 10:17 AM

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Answer 1

B4rtj4h

Level 1

9 points

Mar 17, 2011 10:46 AM in response to EmergeSpain

Hi an welcome to the club. A lot of people have this problem since they updated to 4.3. Thanks to apple its not working anymore. Hope they release an update soon!!

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Answer 2

EmergeSpain Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 17, 2011 11:14 AM in response to B4rtj4h

Thanks for your reply B4rtj4h.

I have iOS 4.2.1, it is not the problem. With an iPhone 3G with 3.1.3 I can't connect.

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Answer 3

Mar 18, 2011 12:55 AM in response to EmergeSpain

you really should be only using the "printable ascii character set" of 95 (96?) characters. does extended mean the entire ascii character set of 0-255?

by any chance do you have an airport extreme? Or a Time Capsule?

if yes, you can load airport utility and use the WPA Pre-Shared key as an alternative to typing in the password with extended characters. ive done that with my kindle. it gives you the hexadecimal equivalent hash of your ssid and your password. you run airport utility, select base station and click on "Equivalent network password"

have you tried sending the password to the iphone with SMS or an email and using copy and pasting it in settings?

ive done that, but ive noticed that sometimes notes puts in an extra linefeed that doesn't work. iirc the messaging program put in a extra linefeed in the middle of my password and i had to copy it from messaging to notes to delete the linefeed and then paste it into settings

i wonder if iphone configuration utility can be used, i haven't tried that one yet

other routers might reveal the hexadecimal equivalent password

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Answer 4

Mar 18, 2011 1:20 AM in response to rigormortis

if you do not have an airport extreme base station or a time capsule. try going to
http://www.xs4all.nl/~rjoris/wpapsk.html

it appears to generate the same "equivalent network password" that airport utility would generate.

you simply enter your wifi password and your network ssid and it will give you
a hexadecimal equivalent password to try

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Answer 5

EmergeSpain Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 18, 2011 11:54 AM in response to EmergeSpain

Hi rigormortis,

thanks for your help but the link that you give don't work. The site says that key contains strange characters.

Before post here, I've tried with the equivalent HEX key, adding 0x before the key, but it don't works.

To type the special characters is not the problem. For example, I can write 'Ñ' when my iPhone ask me for the password, because I have a spanish keyboard. I can write all the problematics chars with no problem (my key include "ñ" and "¿"), but iOS says "Impossible to join". Letter Ñ here is very very common, and I don't understand how Apple don't let us to have a WPA key with this chars. I can change my key, is so easy, but all others device can connect. Why not my iPhone??

Thanks.

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Answer 6

Mar 18, 2011 5:40 PM in response to EmergeSpain

yeah don't use the entire character set. just use the printable character set of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and symbols.

i remember back in the trs-80 days that if you go outside the "printable ascii character set" theres might be differences between computers and its not guaranteed to work.

as a matter of fact, anything higher then 128 ( or 80 hex ) is not part of the ascii standard, and varies between dos, and windows, and from different character sets in windows such as Arial vs Courier

your on the right track tho. if you keep it to the 95 printable characters but choose a password that is up to 62 characters long it is practically impossible to join as a password with a bigger character set

limit your character set to !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmno pqrstuvwxyz{|}~ and you will be fine

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Answer 7

EmergeSpain Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 19, 2011 8:36 AM in response to rigormortis

Your solution is the easy solution but not the good solution. Why can I connect to my wifi from my Windows PC and not from my iPhone? Why can I put "ñ" in my filenames in MAC OS but not in my wifi password? Why my spanish keyboard layout in iOS have 2ñ" or "¿" but I can't use all of this chars in my wireless key?

Nowadays the wifi encryption is very neccesary and is better have more and more secure keys. If I can use more characters, I have more security . And Apple/iOS limit my options.

Thanks.

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