Has anyone managed to get OVMS working with WPA3 WiFi security? I'm keen to enable this on my router, but OVMS seems to be the only thing holding me back as it will find the SSID but won't connect. I was under the impression that WPA3 was meant to be backwards compatible with (most) WPA2 devices....
The ESP32 is faily limited in wifi capabilities. I would be surprised if we support WPA3 directly, but so long as the router permits fallback to WPA2 it should be ok.
Yes, the used ESP32 chip in OVMS v3 (and the later v3 hardware versions) support WPA3. The problem here is the OVMS-Project-base. Its running on outdated and with no security updates for months getting ESP-IDF version 3.3 (dont mix it up with OVMS v3.3). You can compare it simplified like when you are asking for WPA3 support on your computer but you have not installed software updates to your computer since around 5 years.
The current stable version of the ESP-IDF is 5.2.1 . Version ESP-IDF version 3.3 wont get any updates ever again.
This issue is known for longer time to the OVMS developers. You can follow it here: https://github.com/openvehicles/Open-Vehicle-Monitoring-System-3/issues/908
And why this affects your question:
In the year 2019 ESP added WPA3 support to the ESP32. Here is one of the first commits ESP did for WPA3: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/commit/da07b2b4a7f5a86d817a5f8a32cde737d62b7c2c
If you want the more user-friendly description, then you can click this links:
Here ESP32 running IDF 4.4 and what it supports then: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/release-v4.4/esp32/api-guides/wifi-security.html
And here ESP32 running IDF 5.2 and it got for example additional support for OWE (open wireless encryption - part of WPA3 spec): https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/release-v5.2/esp32/api-guides/wifi-security.html
The 3 sentence summery:
OVMS project is using ESP-IDF v3.3 that does not support WPA3. WPA3 support is been added at first in ESP-IDF version 4.1. There is currently one developer named llange trying to update the ESP-IDF version to current ISP-IDF version 5.
Rather than (repeatedly) whining about it, you could offer to help? If it was a matter of simply re-compiling, we would have done it years ago - but the issue is that ESP IDF v3 vs v5 is very very very different and it is a substantial amount of work to convert a large code base like OVMS between. This is something we obviously want to do, and as you point out are working on; but for most the project as it is works very well for them, so there is little incentive to change.
The real incentive for the project to update to ESP IDF v5 is to be able to support new hardware, and that is what will drive this enhancement.
You talk about me or about the first post user named jamessimpson007?
If you talk about me: I am not a software developer. I was able to help with pointing out https-issues (i cant fix myself because only admin have access to the server configuration) and with documentation (pull requests) like you have seen on github. I even asked to clarify how people could donate to you as the admin of the project, but there are no donations needed on your side.
My answer was as detailed as needed written to jamessimpson007 to make it possible to fully understand that WPA3 is possible and probably upcomming but not supported now because of the old ESP-IDF.
You wrote: 'I would be surprised if we support WPA3 directly'
You do not like the surprise or why the not as happy answer about the text i wrote that explains as good as possible the situation about WPA3 in OVMS HW version 3.x? I dont understand what i did wrong with the text i spend time on to explain jamessimpson007 why WPA3 is unsupported at the moment.