Re: Association race when acting as AP?

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Thu, 2015-07-02 at 12:28 +0200, Michal Kazior wrote:

> > Ultimately, depending on the nl80211 capabilities, the station 
> > should
> > in fact be added (as unauthenticated) before even sending the
> > authentication response frame, and then stepping through the stages
> > appropriately.
> 
> While I think it does make sense (I thought of this too, sounds
> desirable) I think it wouldn't solve the race problem entirely. The
> station might no longer be rejected with Deauth but may end up
> confusing AP's internal/offloaded STA powersave state depending on
> implementation detail (what do you do when you receive NullFunc from 
> a
> station that you don't know assoc id of or isn't fully initialized as
> associated?). 

We'd send a deauth with "class 3 frame from unassociated STA" reason :)

> I.e. station should be transitioned to Assoc state
> before sending the Assoc Resp frame.

Yeah, I guess that's still true, but it doesn't preclude adding the
station before auth response and sending an auth response depending on
whether it could be added; perhaps we need to set it to authenticated
just before sending the frame as well though.


johannes