what does WPA/WPA2 really encrypt ??

[User 10929916]

I have WPA2-personal on my laptop and Im connected wirelessly to my home AP.the traffic I capture from wireshark is all unencrypted some days ago I had my router on WPA-personal and did a MITM attack on my smartphone and the traffic was unencrypted too. Isn't WPA supposed to encrypt the traffic and not just ask a password to enter the network ?

[Indivara]

The data is encrypted, you just receive the decrypted data once you connect to the network. I think you have to use something like AirPcap[^] to capture encrypted traffic.