Following further investigation, the root cause appears to be different
from what I initially assumed.
My setup: one router and two WiFi extenders, all broadcasting the same
SSID. The affected laptop sits roughly between all three, closest to
one specific extender.
dmesg (kernel) logs revealed that each failed "authentication" event
corresponded to the driver attempting to associate/roam to a DIFFERENT
BSSID (MAC address) among the three APs — not a fixed AP. Two of the
three consistently produced Reason 15 (4WAY_HANDSHAKE_TIMEOUT) or plain
authentication timeouts, while the third (the physically closest one)
always succeeded:
wlp5s0: deauthenticated from <AP-2 BSSID> (Reason: 15=4WAY_HANDSHAKE_TIMEOUT)
wlp5s0: authentication with <AP-3 BSSID> timed out
wlp5s0: associate with <AP-1 BSSID> ... associated [always succeeds]
Pinning the connection to the working BSSID resolved the issue
completely:
nmcli connection modify "<connection-name>" 802-11-wireless.bssid
<AP-1 BSSID>
This worked on two separate machines (a QCA9377/ath10k laptop and an
Intel AX/iwlwifi laptop), both exhibiting the same "keeps prompting
for password" symptom, which supports that this is a roaming/handshake
issue rather than something specific to network-manager 1.46.0-1ubuntu2.8
or the ath10k driver.
That said, I'd still flag one thing as worth looking at from a
NetworkManager/wpa_supplicant robustness standpoint: on a failed
roam attempt, the behaviour was to sit in "need-auth" / prompt for
the password again (implying a credentials problem) rather than
simply falling back to the previously-working BSSID. That UX is
misleading — the password was never wrong — and could probably be
handled more gracefully.
I'm leaving the network-manager downgrade (1.46.0-1ubuntu2) and the
BSSID pin both in place for now, so I can't fully rule out the
version also playing a role, but the roaming misdiagnosis was clearly
the dominant factor.
** Changed in: network-manager (Ubuntu)
Status: New => Invalid
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2163122
Title:
WPA 4-way handshake repeatedly fails on QCA9377 (ath10k) after
upgrading network-manager to 1.46.0-1ubuntu2.8
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