Wpa_supplicant & netbsd-current & wi-driver

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 08:27:29PM +0200, Risto Sainio wrote:

> As I happen to have the documents for the chipset I started to modify the 
> driver and after a while I got it so far fixed that it scans, associates and 
> authorizes. This all is done by the 802.11 layer written for netbsd, that 
> means that I configured the card to run in hostap-mode and the 802.11-layer 
> sends/receives all necessary frames and runs its own state-machine.

This sounds somewhat complex way of using Prism2/2.5/3 cards in client
mode.. In theory, you might be able to make this work, but Host AP mode
is designed for AP, not client functionality.. I've seen number of
firmware version specific issues in doing this.

If you're main goal is to just make the client mode work with WPA-PSK, I
would suggest using the standard client mode for this and fixing the
driver to support this..

> Now I am stuck with the 4-way handshake: namely the hostapd sends the first 
> EAPOL-message and it seems to me that when my card receives that dataframe it 
> replies with deauth reason:3.

That sounds like one of the main problems I had in using Host AP mode
with certain firmware versions.. The firmware has some sort of
bug/feature that ends up sending out deauth when trying to trick it to
act as a client in Host AP mode. This does not happen with all firmware
versions, though. I don't remember all the details, but I think this was
something that worked with old firmware versions, but not new..

> Now my question is: How can I tell the firmware that it is already associated 
> and authorized OR do I have to issue a JOIN request ??

I don't know whether there is such a mechanism in Host AP mode. You are
trying to do something that the firmware was not designed to do.. If you
want to avoid random tests and experiments to figure out what exactly
the buggy firmware does, you would probably be better off using the
standard client mode instead.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA