Difference between AP and Hotspot

Hardware Librem 5
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I can connect my L5 to my AP at home and to a lot of other AP on my way. The L5 can offer a so called Hotspot to which other clients could.connect. Can clients distinguish between an AP and a Hotspot, saying: Ah, this is a real AP and this is a (personal) Hotspot?

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No, not from user experience, but it may be different on a more technical level.

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Coincidentally, I asked the same question in a different topic in this forum a few days ago.

  1. It looks as if the beacon frame is an extensible format. I can see that there are many attributes that the relevant command on Linux has not been able to recognise / decode. So one answer would be that until you can decode all attributes, you can’t rule out the possibility that an attribute makes it explicit. (I understand that most likely any attribute value can be faked. So I guess it depends whether you mean “distinguish in the face of subterfuge” or “distinguish in the face only of normal operation”.)
  2. The possibility of fingerprinting exists. That would apply not only to the beacon frames but to any other frames transmitted by the WAP - and apply to more than just the content of frames. (Again, subterfuge might be possible.)

You don’t make clear why you are asking the question but if distinguishing a real WAP from a fake WAP is ever important then the correct way is by whether the known PSK works to associate with the WAP. (In other words, the PSK is a shared secret that could be used for mutual authentication.)

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The reason for asking was: I’m for vacation in an area with weak WLAN signal and offered to my son the L5 as Hotspot for his iPhone. The iPhone used this already some times in the past, but didn’t stored the psk of my L5 with the “argumentation” that it is only a “personal” Hotspot.

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Who argued that though? The iPhone or the son?

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The son, about the reason why the psk wasn’t stored. I will check this out.

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The iPhone is asking again (as yesterday) to keyin the psk and does not offer to store it for the future. I will check the same at home with another L5 as client.

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Interesting. Maybe the iPhone is using heuristics to decide that the credentials relate to a hotspot. It would need more investigation.

(Maybe the son told the phone not to store the credentials the first time the hotspot was used and thereafter the phone has stored the fact that the credentials are not to be stored?)

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