Old Centrinos Speak WPA2, too!

After it has now been shown that WPA can be a bit broken, I decided to upgrade and reconfigure my devices to only use WPA2's CCMP together AES encryption. When I wanted to switch a notebook with the very first Centrino chipset to WPA2 (the 802.11b only Intel Pro Wireless LAN 2100) I noticed that I actually couldn't, the options for it are missing in the configuration dialog box. So I looked around on the Internet if a driver update from Intel would fix the problem. Unfortunately, not even Google seems to know. So after a while I decided to just give it a try and installed the Windows XP WPA2 hotfix from Microsoft. After a reboot, WPA2 is now supported even on the old chipset and WPA2 with AES works just fine. In case you want to upgrade as well and don't see WPA2 after the upgrade, you might want to update the driver for the 2100 chip itself, which I did the last time back in 2006 after the malformed Wi-Fi packet exploit showed up. With all my devices running with WPA2 now, I could finally switch the access point to WPA2 only mode.