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implement remark part 1
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Clems1236 committed Oct 29, 2024
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17 changes: 10 additions & 7 deletions src/content/posts/4-way-handshake.md/index.md
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---
title: "4-Way Handshake - Wifi Authentication"
summary: "In this article, you will learn how authentitcation works for WPA/WPA2 network"
summary: "In this article, you will learn how authentication works in WPA/WPA2 based networks"
date: 2024-10-10T20:00:00+0200
lastUpdate: 2024-10-10T20:00:00+0200
tags: ["network", "wifi"]
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---

## Abstract
To connect to a WiFi network, the authentication depends on the WiFi protocol. The most common protocols currently in use are
To connect to a WiFi network, the authentication depends on security protocols, the most common of which are:
1. **WEP**
2. **WPA Personal**
3. **WPA Entreprise**
Expand All @@ -19,19 +19,22 @@ To connect to a WiFi network, the authentication depends on the WiFi protocol. T

> There are 2 different versions of WPA and WPA2 which work slightly differently in terms of authentication.
While WEP and WPA3 have their own authentication protocols, WPA and WPA2 (which are the most common ones) use the **4-Way Handshake** method to allow a device to connect to WiFi and secure connection.
While WEP and WPA3 have their own authentication protocols, WPA and WPA (the most common ones nowadays) use the **4-Way Handshake** method to allow a device to connect to WiFi and secure connection.

The 4-Way Handshake requires a PMK (Pair Master Key), a secret shared by both sides (client and server).
This can be a password (network key) or a username + password as it's the case for Enterprise authentication.
This can be a password (network key) or a username + password in the case of Enterprise authentication.

In this article, you will learn how this method works from a network-oriented approach.
In this article, you will learn how this method works from a network-oriented point of view.

## Configuration
We will consider a WPA-Personal/WPA2-Personal WiFi, so the PMK will just be the WiFi password encrypted. We will go into further explains soon.
We will consider a WPA-Personal/WPA2-Personal WiFi, so the PMK will just be the WiFi password encrypted. We will dive in further explanations shortly.

But remember that except getting PMK before authentication starts threw a WiFi password(secret shared by both sides), WPA2-Entreprise and WPA-Entreprise works the same way.
They use an external RADIUS authentication server with personal user informations and not a global shared key.
Indeed, they use 4-way handshake to secure communication.

Lets consider the following situation:

There is a device that knows the key (password) and wants to connect to a WPA/WPA2-PSK WiFi network.

## 4-Way Handshake Initiation
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This diagram shows the different requests and what they contain.

> Note: *"STA" stands for Station, and "AP" for Access Point*
> The device is actually the station and the access point is the network node handling authentication
## First Request
Firstly, the AP sends a nonce, which is a large random integer.
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