Arch Linux

pbasista

Member

Registered: 2020-04-03

Posts: 2

WPA3 not working with BCM4360 WiFi adapter

Hi,

I am using Arch Linux on a MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015) of the MMGF2xx/A part number series which contains the Broadcom BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43a0] (rev 03). I am trying to use it to connect to a WiFi network that uses WPA3 security. The authentication using wpa_supplicant, however, fails:

wlp3s0: WPA: AP group 0x10 network profile group 0x18; available group 0x10
wlp3s0: WPA: using GTK CCMP
wlp3s0: WPA: AP pairwise 0x10 network profile pairwise 0x18; available pairwise 0x10
wlp3s0: WPA: using PTK CCMP
wlp3s0: WPA: AP key_mgmt 0x400 network profile key_mgmt 0x400; available key_mgmt 0x400
wlp3s0: WPA: Failed to select authenticated key management type
wlp3s0: WPA: Failed to set WPA key management and encryption suites

Authenticating using the iwd also does not work, although the default logs are very brief:

[iwd]# station wlp3s0 connect "WPA3 Network" 
Operation not supported

The following wireless network configuration has been used with wpa_supplicant:

network={
    ssid="WPA3 Network"
    sae_password="correct_password"
    key_mgmt=SAE
    ieee80211w=2
}

I am using the up-to-date versions of the standard Arch kernel, broadcom-wl WiFi driver, wpa_supplicant and iwd. In particular, I am using the following versions of those packages:

core/linux 5.10.10.arch1-1 [installed]
community/broadcom-wl 6.30.223.271-260 [installed]
core/wpa_supplicant 2:2.9-7 [installed]
community/iwd 1.11-1 [installed]

The errors which wpa_supplicant reports in my case are also mentioned in the Common Problems section of the README for the Wacker application. It suggests that this kind of issue is caused by the driver not supporting the correct AKM (authentication and key management), in this case WPA3.

WPA3 Specification document states the following regarding the AKM within the WPA3-Personal only mode:

A STA shall allow at least AKM suite selector 00-0F-AC:8 to be selected for an association
A STA shall not allow AKM suite selector: 00-0F-AC:2, 00-0F-AC:6 to be selected for an association

Perhaps the error messages from wpa_supplicant indeed mean that the encountered WPA3-specific suite selectors are not supported by some part of the used WiFi stack but I am not sure how to verify that.

I have also tried configuring the WiFi network to use the WPA2-PSK/WPA3-SAE mixed mode for authentication but it did not have any observable effect. The BCM4360 WiFi adapter was still unable to connect and the error messages reported by wpa_supplicant were the same. At the same time, I was able to successfully connect to the created WPA3 wireless network using my Android phone so the network itself seems to be configured correctly.

Does anyone have a similar experience with WPA3 not working on BCM4360 WiFi adapter? If yes, is it an issue with the hardware, the kernel module driver or perhaps something else? And can it potentially be fixed, e.g. by a new version of the broadcom-wl package?

Thank you for the information.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,391

Re: WPA3 not working with BCM4360 WiFi adapter

The wl driver does not support NL80211_WPA_VERSION_3 see wl_set_wpa_version in wl/sys/wl_cfg80211_hybrid.c

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,280

Re: WPA3 not working with BCM4360 WiFi adapter

broadcom stopped developing their broadcom-wl driver in 2015, all new devices are supported with the open source kernel driver.

Adding the BCM4360 to the open source driver would require porting everything from the fmac to the smac driver, a big task.
https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wir … 31613.html

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pbasista

Member

Registered: 2020-04-03

Posts: 2

Re: WPA3 not working with BCM4360 WiFi adapter

The wl driver does not support NL80211_WPA_VERSION_3 see wl_set_wpa_version in wl/sys/wl_cfg80211_hybrid.c

Thank you, I did not check for that.

broadcom stopped developing their broadcom-wl driver in 2015

Adding the BCM4360 to the open source driver would require porting everything from the fmac to the smac driver, a big task.

I see, thank you.

So, if I understand correctly, the WPA3 support for BCM4360 is currently missing in the broadcom-wl driver. In theory it is possible to add support for it but Broadcom does not update the source code of this kernel module driver anymore. And the brcm80211 driver that is part of the Linux kernel currently does not support this device.

In the message you linked to about adding support for BCM4360 to the brcm80211 driver, Arend van Spriel states that:

The brcm80211 softmac driver (brcmsmac) does not support any 11ac chips so that is a big task.

That message is from 2015 so things might have changed since then. However, a brief search for "BCM4360" within the Linux Kernel commit history does not reveal any progress in adding the support for this device (no related commits in the brcmsmac section).

I also do not know whether WPA3 works on this WiFi device with OS X.