Time for action – connecting to a WPA network

We can proceed with the following steps:

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 following screenshot. We will name this file wpa-supp.conf:

   

2. We will then invoke the wpa_supplicant utility with the following command:

   wpa_supplicant -D wext -i wlan0 -c wpa-supp.conf
   

3. This will connect the device to the WPA network we just cracked. Once the connection is successful, wpa_supplicant will give you the message: Connection to XXXX completed.

4. For both the WEP and WPA networks, once you are connected, you can use dhclient to grab a DHCP address from the network by typing dhclient3 wlan0.

What just happened?

The default Wi-Fi utility iwconfig cannot be used to connect to WPA/WPA2 networks...