Security Issue: How secure is sending confidential credentials via wpa_cli type interface?

[Bryan Kadzban]

Jouni Malinen wrote:
> In many ways, this new mechanisms brings same level of support for
> Windows builds that was available with Linux and BSD builds. I will
> likely replace UDP-based mechanism with named pipe -based one as the
> default option in future releases after the new code has received
> some more testing.

A thought on the security of the pipe(s):

When you add support for securing them, it would probably be the easiest
from a code perspective to let the config file use an SDDL string to set
up the permissions.  You can use [1] to convert that SDDL string into a
new security descriptor (which would become the lpSecurityDescriptor
member of the SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure passed to CreateNamedPipe).

See also [2], MSDN's page on the SDDL language.

[1]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/secauthz/security/convertstringsecuritydescriptortosecuritydescriptor.asp
[2]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/secauthz/security/security_descriptor_definition_language.asp
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