Thoughts on 802.1X-REV

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:42:40AM +0530, Paresh Sawant wrote:

> Would the upcoming  IEEE 802.1x-REV have an impact on the existing 802.1X
> state machines and authentication mechanism ?

As long as the existing implementations are not changed, obviously, new
version of the standard does not change anything.. I have not yet went
through all details in the 802.1X-REV drafts, but will hopefully get to
that once the draft gets into IEEE-SA sponsor ballot. Anyway, the new
version better maintain backwards compatibility with old, deployed
versions and as such, the main effect would be to whoever might be
interested in implementing 802.1X from scratch (or updating an old
implementation) based on the new standard once it is published.

> Are we planning to replace the current 802.1x implementation with 802.1x-REV
> ?

I don't see any point in doing that at this point. The main changes
proposed in 802.1X-REV seem to be for 802.1AE and not that much for the
way 802.1X is used with 802.11.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA