I'm testing an athn(4) wireless adapter (Qualcomm Atheros AR9280) in
"Host AP" mode on OpenBSD 6.7 (amd64). While trying the hidenwid flag,
I discovered that the ESSID is sent in responses to unspecified probe
requests. This can be seen by capturing packets on another machine with
wireless adapter in monitor mode. The ifconfig(8) manpage says this:
"The ‘hidenwid’ flag will hide the network ID (ESSID) in beacon
frames when operating in Host AP mode. It will also prevent responses
to probe requests with an unspecified network ID."
I can confirm that no ESSID is sent in beacon frames, but the adapter
will both respond to probe requests and also add the ESSID to those
responses.
In athn(4) manpage under "CAVEATS" there is no information about
problems with the hidenwid flag.
# cat /etc/hostname.athn0
mediaopt hostap mode 11g chan 6
nwid TEST-AP wpakey 123456789 nwflag hidenwid
inet 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.255
# ifconfig athn0
athn0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
lladdr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
index 4 priority 4 llprio 3
groups: wlan
media: IEEE802.11 autoselect mode 11g hostap
status: active
ieee80211: nwid TEST-AP chan 6 bssid XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX -95dBm \
wpakey wpaprotos wpa2 wpaakms psk wpaciphers ccmp wpagroupcipher ccmp \
hidenwid
inet 192.168.10.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.10.255
Does anyone have an idea what could be the problem?
I'm not trying to start a discussion on whether hiding the ESSID is
ridiculous or not, I'm just testing different things, so I know which
features work and which don't.
Regards,
Mogens Jensen
