Management frames problem in 0.0.4 and later

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 11:00:21PM +0100, Petr Novak wrote:

> some time I have posted a problem with management frames (authentication) in 
> 0.0.4 and later version (it was late September and it referred to current 
> CVS). I was told to narrow it to before/after 0.0.4 which I did and to sniff 
> the actual communication, which I have posted a week ago. However, I have not 
> received any further information. Is someone (Jouni?) looking into the 
> problem, or I am completely left to my own? I would appreciate some 
> acknowledgement that someone is prepared to look at the problem.

Sorry, I have had somewhat limited amount of time available for Host AP
project lately and since the weather has been quite nice here, it has
been too easy to find something else to do during weekends.. Should
try to fix that somehow (the amount of time, I mean; the weather can
remain nice ;-).

Anyway, I just replied to your email. I couldn't find anything
conclusive from the logs, but at least they confirmed that something
seems to be quite broken in the packet ACKing/retrying.

> I can try to localize the problem further, but I might need some more 
> guidance. If everything else fails, I will try the hostap changes one by one 
> between 0.0.3 and 0.0.4 to find which one is the root cause of the problem.

If you are willing to do this, you could consider doing a kind of binary
search from the CVS by checking out versions based on data stamp between
0.0.3 and 0.0.4 release dates.. Unfortunately, I do not have any good
guesses about which specific snapshots would be most likely to cause
issues like this.

One, maybe somewhat related, change I did in CVS last weekend was to
mark STAs authenticated immediately after sending out authentication
frame whereas the previously an ACK was required from STA before
changing authentication status. This could make it easier for the STA to
associate in some cases because association does not fail anymore if AP
was able to see the authentication frame but missed the ACK frames.
However, association is still requiring a successful ACK, so the problem
might just move one step forward..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA