Using no encryption

Note: If you're creating a wireless network with no encryption, anyone who's within range of the wireless network (e.g. someone driving by your building) can easily view all network traffic. It's possible to create a network without using encryption, but we don't recommend it unless the network has been secured by some other mechanism.

Many consumer devices (wireless routers to connect your internal LAN to the Internet for example) are shipped with security features such as encryption turned off. We recommend that you enable encryption in these devices rather than turn off encryption when creating a wireless network.

Use wpa_supplicant to associate with a security-disabled Wi-Fi network. For example, if your /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file can contain a network block as follows:

network = {
    ssid = "network name"
    key_mgmt = NONE
}

you can then run:

wpa_supplicant -i abc0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

You may also use wpa_cli to tell wpa_supplicant what you want to do. You can use either ifconfig or wpa_cli to check the status of the network. To complete your network configuration, see “Client in infrastructure or ad hoc mode” in the section on TCP/IP interface configuration.