Hostapd recognizing ACKs from wpa_supplicant, but not external stations nor a packet crafter immediately adjacent to hostapd's interfaces

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 04:31:35PM +0000, Alfred Kenny wrote:
> My research group has been having trouble getting hostapd to recognize the 802.11 acknowledgement frames in response to the authentication and association responses that it is generating. In fact, we've become so frustrated that we've created a test agent using libtins solely for testing the ACKing authentication and association frames. Our setup is this:

hostapd does not receive or process an ACK frame; the WLAN hardware,
firmware, and/or driver are the places where this is done and the result
(TX status) is reported to hostapd.

> 3) Observe the outcome on hwsim0.

If that indicates that you are using mac80211_hwsim, please note that TX
status is handled quite differently there.. The actual ACK frame has
nothing to do with that, i.e., this is based on internal knowledge of
which radio(s) are awake on the channel on which a frame is transmitted.
This has little to do with how IEEE 802.11 works over real hardware and
as such, you cannot really do what you are describing here with
mac80211_hwsim.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA