Query: can wpa_supplicant set up an ad-hoc network

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 02:03:57PM +0800, Soh Kam Yung wrote:

> network={
>        ssid="my WPA ad-hoc network"
>        mode=1
>        key_mgmt=WPA-NONE
>        proto=WPA
>        pairwise=NONE
>        group=TKIP
>        psk="blahblahblahblahblah"
> }
> 
> Is this the only WPA secured configuration supported for ad-hoc?  Must
> key_mgmt be WPA-NONE and pairwise be NONE?
Yes and yes.

> I checked the IEEE Std. 802.11-2007 document and Section 5.8.3 (IBSS
> functional model description) describes an IBSS where pairwise traffic
> is also encrypted and exchanged.

WPA-None is not defined by IEEE standard (it is from WPA specification)
and it does not match with the RSN mechanism you are describing here.

> The example also uses the 4-way handshake to exchange the transmit
> keys between each station that wants to communicate in the IBSS.  Does
> wpa_supplicant remember all of this key information?

wpa_supplicant does not support 4-way handshake in IBSS case (or well,
there is some experimental code to do this in the current development
branch, but it not yet complete and would require driver support for RSN
in IBSS, too).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA