parallel 802.1x pre-authentication.

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 12:43:20PM -0500, Ohad Shatil wrote:

> I'd be intrested in knowing whether the wpa_supplicant supports (or
> what are design considerations to make it support) issuing
> pre-authentication requests to mutiple BSSIDs in parallel, and without
> dependencies between success/fail of a particular negotiation. In
> other words - having multiple instances of pre-authentication
> state-machines. Knowledge of pre-authentication capability of the
> BSSID (AP) may be gathered by some sort of 802.11k Network Management,
> not only relying on the RSN IE.

wpa_supplicant does not use more than one pre-authentication at the same
time by design choice. This was done to limit the memory use for systems
with limited resources. TLS authentication is one of the most memory
consuming operations that wpa_supplicant is doing and now, there can be
two of those happening at the same time (normal reauth and pre-auth).

If one would not need to care about memory use, it should be relatively
straightforward to add support for multiple pre-authentications. Then
again, I don't think this would really be worth the extra complexity in
implementation..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA