Association Failures with Legacy Printers due to Management Frame Protection- A Technical Analysis
Let's understand first, what is Management Frame Protection? Based on the IEEE 802.11w amendment, Protected Management Frames (PMF), also known as Management Frame Protection (MFP), is a security feature that provides integrity protection for both unicast and broadcast management frames, while also encrypting unicast management frames in the same way as data to provide confidentiality. Without the Protected Management Frames feature, all management frames are sent unprotected in the open. Transmitting open frames makes connections vulnerable to attack. To leverage Protected Management Frames, both the AP and the STA need to be capable of using it, and it must be activated for each encrypted Wi-Fi network of the AP. If those conditions are met, Protected Management Frames are automatically invoked during client association. Understanding Management Frame Protection Failures MFP is one of the common challenge when working with legacy devices in modern wireless networks. My recent t...