understand Supplicant PAE state machine

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 01:40:34PM -0700, ifreebiz at fastmail.fm wrote:

>    I think I understand this better now. An eapolEAP packet at
>    CONNECTING state will cause the supplicant PAE state machine to go to
>    Restart state; in addition, the EAP state machine will restart, and
>    then triger the PAE state machine to transit from RESTART state to
>    Authenticating state.
>     So the purpose of RESTART state in PAE SM is to cause the EAP state
>     machine to restart during the transition from Connecting state to
>     Authenticatng state. Please let me know if my understanding is
>     wrong.

Yes, RESTART state is indeed used to inform the higher later (EAP) that
the authentication was restarted. By the way, IEEE Std 802.1X-2004 has
quite thorough explanation of the state machines and meanings of
different states and state variables. wpa_supplicant follows the
standard state machines as closely as reasonable, so this standard is
quite useful documentation on how this part of wpa_supplicant is
expected to work.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA