WeWork wifi error on Ubuntu 22.04

Being locked out of wifi is annoying, really. Especially when you're on a known network.

Thanks to my company, I'm the happy owner of a WeWork access card which allows me to go to any of their coworking sites and work from there. Today I had a day-long meeting with my team at one of these locations.

WeWork does not only offer nice locations and good coffee but also a unified wifi connection: on any place, you connect to the same wifi network with the same credentials. Usually, you come to the place, take a coffee, find a seat and enjoy a good working day. But today, it didn't work.

I was watching network-manager trying to connect continuously and failing with an SSL error. Strange. Some digging in my laptop's logs, some internet searches¹ and I found a solution. In Ubuntu 22.04, Canonical and the community finally upgraded OpenSSL to version 3. Included in this upgrade was the deprecation of some old ciphers and providers. And, unfortunately, the wifi system at my coworking location was not updated.

The fix is "simple" as it only impacts wpa_supplicant and won't lower the security level of your system.