Time for action – connecting to a WPA network

1. In the case of WPA, the matter is a bit more complicated. The iwconfig utility cannot be used with WPA/WPA2 Personal and Enterprise, as it does not support it. We will use a new tool called WPA_supplicant , for this lab. To use WPA_supplicant for a network, we will need to create a configuration file as shown in the screenshot. We will name this file wpa-supp.conf:

   

2. We will then invoke the WPA_supplicant utility with the following options -Dwext -iwlan0 –c wpa-supp.conf to connect to the WPA network, we just cracked as shown. Once the connection is successful, WPA_supplicant will give you a message Connection to XXXX completed:

   

3. For both the WEP and WPA networks, once you are connected, you want to use Dhcpclient3 to grab a DHCP address from the network as shown next:

   

What just happened?

The default Wi-Fi utility iwconfig cannot be used to connect to WPA/WPA2 networks. The de-facto tool for this is WPA_Supplicant. In this lab, we saw how we can...