WiFi QR Code format for WPA2/WPA3

Question

I'm creating a new QR code for my WiFi guest network and with my new router it supports WPA2/WPA3 Personal (AES).

I've tried multiple iterations of the auto-configuration format (which I can't find official documentation for?), but none works. I use this;

WIFI:S:SSID_NAME;H:true;T:WPA2;P:PASSWORD;;

And then so far I tried to replace WPA2 with;

• WPA2-3
• WPA23
• WPA2/WPA3
• WPA2-WPA3
• WPA2-WPA3-AES
• WPA3

All fail to become a valid scannable QR code.

It's probably very simple, but honestly without proper documentation I have no idea what it would want me to insert here.

Answer 1

The format was originally invented, and documented, by the ZXing QR decoder. There is no value for WPA3 (or WPA2 for that matter) because the value T:WPA means any WPA version, not just WPA1 (although ZXing accepts "T:WPA2", it treats it identically to "T:WPA"), and partly because the development of ZXing had already been abandoned by the time WPA3 was published.

Since then, the format has been adopted by Wi-Fi Alliance and is part of the WPA3 Specification (page 25). It always uses T:WPA for the "security type" field (indicating any form of password-based authentication), but adds R:1 for "WPA2/WPA3 transition mode disable" – for devices which understand it. Because of this, it doesn't have an option to outright prevent the use of WPA2 if nothing better is supported. (This might be deliberate.)

Not all QR code scanners support all features of the format – even on a WPA3-capable device, older apps (e.g. those based on ZXing) will not recognize the R tag at all.