Password requirements for Wi-Fi WPA2

Question

Wikipedia says:

Also referred to as WPA-PSK (pre-shared key) mode, this is designed for home and small office networks and doesn't require an authentication server.[9] Each wireless network device encrypts the network traffic using a 256 bit key. This key may be entered either as a string of 64 hexadecimal digits, or as a passphrase of 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters.

Is it true that every human in the world uses ASCII printable characters for their WPA passwords? What about China, Arabic countries, Japan and many many others?

The Latin alphabet is used by only small fraction of world's population. Are people forced to set up ASCII printable characters for their Wi-Fi passwords across the entire world?

Solution

Yes, the whole world has to use ASCII for their WPA-/WPA2-PSK passphrases.

This may not be a big a burden as you may think, as ASCII has been so pervasive in computing since it was first invented, that the computer-using populace worldwide is well versed in using ASCII. For example, hostnames and domain names were ASCII-only for quite a long time (have internationalized (Unicode-based) domain names even caught on anywhere yet?). Most programming languages are still ASCII-only, or "Unicode-unfriendly" at best. Command-line environments tend to also be ASCII-only or Unicode-unfriendly, etc.

Because of this legacy, understanding how to deal with ASCII is, sadly, just a part of becoming "computer literate" in any culture.

Comments

[Ravi Kumar]

[citation needed]