Re: [PATCH] cfg80211: implement wext key handling

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

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On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 09:50 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:

> I modified the meaning of RESTRICTED/OPEN a few years ago to control the
> WEP auth mode, for a few reasons...  First, some fullmac drivers already
> used it to mean WEP auth mode.  Second, there was no other mechanism to
> control WEP auth mode at the time, and there were a lot of Shared Key
> installations around.  Third, WE-18/WPA was nowhere near being landed,
> and it was only supported by one driver (hostap), and it was the only
> thing that would plausibly support WEP auth mode via SIWAUTH.  Fourth,
> only hostap and maybe airo really implemented the refuse-non-encoded
> anyway.

But didn't update the header file ;)

> TBH, SK is nice because it tells you that the WEP key is wrong
> *immediately*, and the only reason NM doesn't use SK by default (and
> then fall back to OS) like the original Mac Airport drivers did is that
> WEXT simply cannot return reliable association error information.

Hah. Well, we could have that now, but I suspect SK is no longer common
enough to put a lot of work into it.

> But in the end, we still need a mechanism with WEXT to be able to set SK
> auth when associating.

We still have that, with WE18, in IW_AUTH_80211_AUTH_ALG. And mac80211
never actually supported _setting_ the WEP auth mechanism with
RESTRICTED/OPEN, only _getting_ that information.

johannes


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