WPA3 adoption in multi-dwelling units presents a unique set of challenges
The Wi-Fi industry loves a good checklist. WPA3 support? Check. Six gigahertz? Check. Protected management frames? Check. But as a recent CWNP webinar titled “Wi-Fi Security in 2026: Beyond WPA3 Bullet Points for 802.11 Networks” made abundantly clear, the gap between what the specifications promise and what networks actually deliver is wider than most people realize.
At Maravedis Research, where we track managed Wi-Fi deployments across multifamily and commercial environments, we see this gap every day. As we explored in our earlier analysis, “WPA3 in MDUs: Stronger Security, Tougher Deployment?” (read the full article here), WPA3 adoption in multi-dwelling units presents a unique set of challenges that go well beyond checking a certification box. Property owners and managed service providers often assume that WPA3 compliance equals security. It does not, and the CWNP webinar reinforced why.
The “optional” problem
One of the most compelling points raised in the CWNP webinar is the distinction between required and optional features within the 802.11 standard and Wi-Fi Alliance certifications. When a feature is required, it tends to be precisely defined in the specification, leading to consistent implementations across vendors. When a feature is optional, the definitions are often vaguer, and vendor implementations become what the presenter diplomatically called “haphazard.”
This matters enormously for WPA3. The certification includes several optional components, and their inconsistent implementation across client devices and access points creates real interoperability headaches. For managed Wi-Fi providers serving hundreds of residents with diverse devices, this is not a theoretical concern. It is a daily operational reality.
Transition mode: Convenience vs. security
WPA3 transition mode is one of the most widely deployed configurations in the field, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. Transition mode allows an access point to serve both WPA3 and WPA2 clients simultaneously. On the surface, this seems like a sensible approach to backward compatibility. In practice, it introduces a meaningful vulnerability.
As the CWNP webinar explained, when transition mode is enabled, WPA3-capable clients can potentially be downgraded to WPA2 through certain attack methods. The WPA3 specification does include a “transition disable” mechanism that is supposed to prevent this. Once a client detects that an SSID supports WPA3, it should flag that network and never fall back to WPA2 again. The problem? This feature is not consistently implemented across vendors, and in some cases, it can actually break client connectivity.
The more practical recommendation from the webinar, and one we echo in our advisory work, is to use separate SSIDs for WPA3 and WPA2 clients. This adds some network management overhead, but it prevents cross-contamination of security postures between newer and legacy devices.
SAE: The real security upgrade
The most significant security advancement in WPA3 Personal is the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) handshake, also known as the Dragonfly handshake. Under WPA2, anyone who captured the four-way handshake and knew the passphrase could derive the encryption keys and decrypt traffic. WPA3’s SAE changes this fundamentally.
With SAE, the passphrase goes through an elliptic curve cryptography-based exchange before the four-way handshake even begins. Each session generates different cryptographic material, even when the same passphrase is used. This provides what cryptographers call perfect forward secrecy: compromising one session does not compromise past or future sessions.
For network administrators, this is a double-edged sword. The security improvement is substantial, but it also means you can no longer capture the handshake to derive keys for troubleshooting purposes, something that was common practice with WPA2. Support teams need to adjust their diagnostic workflows accordingly.
WPA3 enterprise 192-bit mode: Not what it sounds like
The CWNP webinar also clarified a point of persistent confusion around WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode. Despite the name, you will not find the number 192 in any of the actual cryptographic requirements. The mode requires AES-256, SHA-384, ECDH-384, and RSA keys of at least 3072 bits. The “192” refers to the equivalent bit strength of SHA-384, which serves as the baseline security level.
In practice, WPA3 Enterprise 192-bit mode effectively requires EAP-TLS with client certificates. This aligns with government requirements like the CNSA suite defined by NIST, but it also raises the deployment complexity bar significantly. For multifamily and hospitality environments, where device diversity is extreme, this level of enterprise security remains aspirational for most operators.
GCMP-256: Mandated but not used
Perhaps the most telling data point from the webinar involved GCMP-256, the cipher suite mandated for support in 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) devices and required for use with Multi-Link Operation (MLO). A survey of Wi-Fi 7 networks found that out of hundreds of deployments, only a handful were actually using GCMP-256. The rest had support for it but were defaulting to CCMP.
This perfectly illustrates the gap between specification and reality that should concern anyone designing or evaluating managed Wi-Fi solutions.
What this means for MDU operators and MSPs
The CWNP webinar focused primarily on the protocol-level details of WPA3, but for those of us working in multifamily connectivity, these technical nuances have very practical consequences. As we documented in our earlier piece on WPA3 in MDUs, the most pressing deployment challenge is the absence of native Multi-Pre-Shared Key (MPSK) support in the WPA3 standard. MDU operators have long relied on MPSK or vendor-specific alternatives like Ruckus DPSK to assign unique credentials per unit, enabling both security segmentation and streamlined onboarding at scale.
WPA3 broke many of those proprietary workflows. Vendors have responded with solutions like DPSK3, but these remain outside the standard, creating interoperability concerns and platform lock-in. The Wi-Fi Alliance has acknowledged this gap and indicated that work is underway on a standards-based approach for unique pre-shared credentials in multi-tenant environments, but nothing has been finalized.
Layer the CWNP webinar’s findings on top of this, and the picture becomes even more complex. Transition mode risks, inconsistent optional feature support, and the gap between mandated support and actual use of stronger cipher suites all compound the challenges MSPs face when rolling out WPA3 across large residential portfolios. The onboarding problem is especially acute for headless IoT devices, which lack traditional interfaces for entering credentials or scanning QR codes, and which represent a growing share of connected devices in multifamily properties.
The bottom line
WPA3 is a meaningful improvement over WPA2, and its mandatory use in six gigahertz bands ensures that newer deployments will benefit from stronger security foundations. But the bullet-point version of WPA3 obscures critical implementation details that determine whether a network is genuinely more secure or simply carrying a newer label.
For property owners, MSPs, and ISPs evaluating managed Wi-Fi platforms, the questions worth asking go beyond “Do you support WPA3?” The real questions are about transition mode policies, MPSK alternatives, cipher suite configurations, client compatibility testing, and how vendors handle the optional features that make or break real-world security. As the industry navigates this transitional phase, choosing platforms that solve for both protocol compliance and operational reality will separate the leaders from the laggards in MDU connectivity.
