ignore_broadcast_ssid without effect

[Dennis Borgmann]

Jouni,

the idea of hiding the SSID is to prevent automated programs trying to
associate (think of Windows-drivers, that automatically scan and try to
associate). The background on this is to lower traffic on a specified
channel in general and avoid absolutely unneccessary traffic on the AP.

By hiding the SSID, automated programs and users just looking at their
wireless GUI ("Oh! What kind of WLAN is this? Hmm... I'll just try to
connect.") would be taken out of the traffic-generation calculation,
which would gain a channel being more free. I know, that these packets
are negligible low in quantity and bandwidth comsumption, but I want to
be absolutely secure to have a free channel due to low latency. Think of
hundreds of users in parallel trying to associate and maybe you get a
filled channel with a whole bunch of waste...

Moving to ath5k has been taken into consideration, but is at current
state of project not possible...

Kind regards,
Dennis

Jouni Malinen schrieb:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:05:11AM +0200, Dennis Borgmann wrote:
>
>   
>> I am using hostapd in connection with madwifi-0.9.4 and I am seeing the
>> problem, that I cannot hide my ssid. See my hostapd.conf below:
>>     
>
>   
>> Although I am using "ignore_broadcast_ssid=1", the SSID still appears in
>> the beacons and the AP answers to broadcast SSID-requests. I tested with
>> hostapd-0.6.9 and the hostap-06.git -version from Febuary 2nd, 2010. Any
>> suggestions what I am doing wrong?
>>     
>
> ignore_broadcast_ssid=1 is only supported with drivers that use hostapd
> for generating the Beacon frame template and processing Probe Request
> frames; madwifi is not in that category. It could be possible to use
> this if you were to move from madwifi to ath5k or ath9k.
>
>
> PS.
>
> May I ask why you would like to use SSID hiding? In general, it does not
> really bring in any additional security (SSID will be sent out in plain
> in Probe Response and Association Request frames) and it is considered
> harmful (breaks some stations and makes it more difficult to find the
> AP).
>
>