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Apparently the WPA2-PSK password can have a length ranging from 8 to 63 characters. Letters, numbers, and special characters can be used.

I would like to know what special characters can be used in a Wi-Fi access password with WPA2-PSK security and if all connecting devices have to support them or if, on the contrary, each device can have its own repertoire of special characters enabled.

I want to set up a robust and reliable Wifi password for my devices since someone has managed to breach the security of my router, but when I change my password, not all the devices I have can connect to the router. Some yes, some no. And I cannot identify the problem, since the same device that fails to connect has worked correctly for me at another time and has been connected to the network without apparent problems.

Sorry if the question is not appropriate for this forum, I'm quite a newbie and I'm trying to catch up as soon as possible.

Ramhound
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markbiophysicist
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1 Answers1

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what special characters can be used in a Wi-Fi access password with WPA2-PSK security

The original IEEE 802.11i (2004) specification says:

  • Here, the following assumptions apply:

    • A pass-phrase is a sequence of between 8 and 63 ASCII-encoded characters.[...]
    • Each character in the pass-phrase must have an encoding in the range of 32 to 126 (decimal), inclusive

In short, any 'printable' ASCII character is allowed.

(Unicode is not specified; some devices may allow you to enter Unicode and treat it as UTF-8, which is a reasonable thing to do, but nevertheless non­standard.)

and if all connecting devices have to support them or if, on the contrary, each device can have its own repertoire of special characters enabled.

Each device can support any characters it wants. There are devices that can't type an underscore. The Wi-Fi specification doesn't mandate anything about that.

I want to set up a robust and reliable Wifi password for my devices since someone has managed to breach the security of my router

Make sure the router/access point is running the latest firmware, with mitigations for the various WPA2 security issues such as KRACK.

If you're worried about "brute-force password cracking" attacks, use a longer password. Merely increasing the length by 1 character has a much larger impact on the number of possible combinations than adding 1 special character as an option.

(For example, if you start with 10 alphanumeric characters – assuming the attacker knows that you have 10 alphanumeric character – then you have 6210 possibilities. Let's say you sprinkle in three different special characters; that's 6510 which is about 1.6 times more. But if you stay with the same alphanumerics and just increase the length to 11 characters, now you have 6211, which is… 62 times more.)

grawity
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