wpa-supplicant for adhoc networking?

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 06:09:05PM -0500, newbie wpa-list wrote:

> Hi, Is there a way to use wpa_supplicant for a network of adhoc nodes. I
> use the simple WEP encryption for adhoc nodes, but I am not at all
> satisfied with the security WEP offers. I would rather prefer to use
> certificates to authenticate adhoc nodes. I have used wpa_supplicant for
> certificate based authentication among in Infrastructure mode, and I
> thought there must be a way to use the software for adhoc mode as well.
> If its not that easy and might require a lot of changes in the software,
> I would appreciate if someone from the developing guys could give me a
> hint which files could be interesting to look at for possible changes and
> what serious issues I might solve once I try to include / rewrite some
> code for getting the software working for my adhoc network.

Doing full IEEE 802.11i/802.1X authentication for adhoc networks would
indeed require a lot of changes and not only in wpa_supplicant, but also
in the drivers. Basically, one would need to integrate authenticator
from hostapd with wpa_supplicant and allow wpa_supplicant to act as both
the authenticator and supplicant between multiple adhoc nodes.

There has been some work on this area, but I think quite a bit more will
still be needed to get this working.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA