Existing ssid and/or password rejected by Smart Hub 2 'change wifi' function

[DaveRo]

I have been using ssid 'Miss Piggy' and a 32 character password (all lower case letters) for several years. Poking about in the router I saw that channel was set to 11 and that 'smart' was an option, so I decided to change to that. (Smart was already configured for 5GHz - I don't remember why it wasn't for 2.4.)

That was an unfortunate decision! Saving the settings appeared to work. It warned me that it didn't approve of my password but appeared to accept my override. But nothing could sign in. I experimented with an 'acceptable' password - same ssid - but couldn't sign in to that. And the password field reverted to the old one.

I factory-reset the router. I then tried changing the ssid and password to my old one to avoid having to change lots of kit, but I couldn't - it appeared to save but the ssid and password field were unchanged. So I'll live with the default. I had to reconfigure several devices, which was a PITA.

Anybody else had this? Is an ssid with a space or a 32-letter password now invalid?

[imjolly]

I always thought that a space was not accepted.

a factory reset should have taken SSID and password back to the start.  when you did factory reset did you hold the reset button for 20/30 secs until the hub lights flashed

[DaveRo]

It's had that space in the ssid since I got the hub and first configured it. It had it in my old PlusNet hub. I can't remember how I configured it, but I think I must have just typed it in.

The reset worked fine, as I wrote.

[DaveRo · Accepted solution]

I conclude this is a bug in the router. It may be nothing to do with the space in the ssid, or the 32-character password, or overriding the 'insecure password' warning.  It could just be it doesn't work in Firefox.

I didn't mention, but it may be relevant, that after I factory-reset the router I tried restoring a backup, but it said it was invalid. The backup was was from 3/24 - not ancient - so it should have worked. If we're supposed to take a new backup after some firmware updates we should get a notification IMO.

[WSH]

What you use is up to you, of course, but a few things you can try if you want to resolve this:

The "insecure" warning is probaly being triggered by the all lowercase.  That's very much a no, no it IT circles these days, even at 32 characters.  I would add some uppercase and numbers.

Shortening it a bit may also help.  32 seems excessive.  I'm going back a few years, but the recommeneded length for WPA2 was at least 20 characters after it was discovered to be vulnerable in 2017.

The space in the SSID may also be the problem.  A lot of systems won't accept a space.  Usual practice is to use an underscore character to denote a space.

[DaveRo]

I refer you to Brian Krebs, who is one of the the world's experts on passwords and how they're cracked:

"Complexity is nice, but length is key ... each character you add to a password or passphrase makes it an order of magnitude harder to attack via brute-force methods"

https://krebsonsecurity.com/password-dos-and-donts/

I have resolved the problem, by resetting and keeping the default ssid and password. But I don't believe the 14-char default key is as secure as my 32-character one.

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[WSH]

A simplistic interpretation but...as I said, it's up to you & if it works, it works.