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Comment by smiley1437 | Hacker News Reader

I looked desperately in the press release for some version of Aerohive's Private PSK (PPSK) where you can have multiple PSKs for the same SSID (Ruckus and Cisco have their own versions too) but couldn't find anything.

The ability to have multiple PSKs and revoking\changing one of them but not the others would be really convenient for small and even medium-sized wifi deployments...

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I'm confused. I run my home wireless off a Debian box using hostapd, and there's specifically an option where you can have multiple passwords on the same SSID, either per-client (by MAC) or for anyone. Is that what you mean? Is this a rare feature?

Hostapd is probably how Cisco, Aerohive, and Ruckus are doing it. It's not that it's exceedingly rare it's just not everywhere as it's not part of wireless standards.

I thought there were patents in this area, preventing implementation without licensing/getting sued?

I'm only aware of patents related to certain systems which implement more than just the base idea of using more than one security key for a given SSID e.g. the Ruckus patent on how Dynamic PSK automatically creates and assigns multiple PSKs from a controller portal.

Our second home WiFi setup has that - it’s by Plume. I can set up a time-based PSK for our SSID, and the APs can even firewall off specific devices or the whole home network (leaving each device in an Internet-only island) for certain PSKs.

I wish they would provide a way to assign PSKs to VLANs. The SuperPods and self-optimization are appealing but their system just doesn't fit into how I want to manage my network.

It has use in large environments as well, there are plenty of old/shit vendor devices in many businesses that aren't getting replaced any time soon just so they support 802.1x in a working manner.

Isn't that usually called WPA Enterprise?

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