hostapd/wpa_supplicant - new development release v0.5.0

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 11:10:14PM +0100, Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 07:50:44PM -0800, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> > * added experimental STAKey handshake implementation for IEEE 802.11e
> >   direct link setup (DLS); note: this is disabled by default in both
> >   build and runtime configuration (can be enabled with CONFIG_STAKEY=y
> >   and stakey=1)
> 
> Could you elaborate on this a bit? What is the gain of using STAKey?
> What's the downside of it?

STAKey handshake itself is not really very useful by itself and I'm not
aware of any driver that would be available for using DLS. This
implementation is more a way of figuring out what exactly was defined in
the standard and what would need to be improved. There are couple of
flaws in the STAKey specification and those are being worked on. In
other words, I would expect this implementation to change in the future
to allow direct link to be used in more secure way.

DLS itself is quite nice improvement (assuming the security setup gets
fixed). It allows stations to send packets directly to each other
without having to go through the AP which is the normal mechanism for
BSS (infrastructure networks). This allows throughput between two
wireless stations that are associated to the same AP to be doubled if
they are within range.

> > * added support for storing EAP user password as NtPasswordHash instead
> >   of plaintext password when using MSCHAP or MSCHAPv2 for
> >   authentication (hash:<16-octet hex value>); added nt_password_hash
> >   tool for hashing password to generate NtPasswordHash
> 
> Nice feature - is this supported for wpa_supplicant configuration
> files as well?

Not at the moment, but it should be relatively straightforward to add
this. I added this to my to-do list.

> Speaking of wpa_supplicant-0.5.x - it would be nice to have the
> functionality found in wpa_ctrl.[ch] available in a shared library for
> use by third party configuration utilities.

Do you mean that this would be another package in addition to
wpa_supplicant and hostapd tarballs? wpa_ctrl.[ch] is shared by both
programs. This shouldn't require much work on the side of building a
library from wpa_ctrl.c and creating a package of needed files.
 
-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA