Could not get PMK

Bryan Kadzban bryan at kadzban.is-a-geek.net
Fri May 23 12:33:22 EDT 2008


On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:16:05AM -0500, David Dudley wrote:
> OK, what is PMK

Pairwise Master Key.  It's the key that WPA and WPA2 both use to derive
the Pairwise Temporal Keys (PTKs) that actually encrypt the data.

If you use WPA-PSK (or WPA2-PSK), then the PMK has the same value as the
PSK, although this is a large hex number, not a string (there's a fixed
algorithm that combines an ASCII string with the SSID to generate this
hex number).

If you use WPA-EAP, then the RADIUS server is supposed to generate the
PMK randomly.

> and why couldn't hostapd get it?

I don't know for sure.  I can guess that it's something to do with the
fact that it's running on NetBSD, but that's purely a guess.

To troubleshoot, it will probably help to get debugging output from
hostapd (and possibly also the client on the other end of the
association, but that's probably not needed yet).

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