[PATCH] Implement APuP Access Point Micro Peering

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 06:31:16PM +0200, gio at eigenlab.org wrote:
> Access Point Micro Peering is a simpler and hopefully more useful successor to
> Ad Hoc, Wireless Distribution System, 802.11s mesh mode, Multi-AP and EasyMesh.
> When enabled almost plain APs communicate between them via 4-address mode,
> like in WDS but all of them are AP, so they can eventually communicate also with
> plain stations and more AP nodes in sight, without more trickery.
> APuP has low hardware requirements, just AP mode support + 4-address mode, and
> no more unnecessary complications, like hardcoded bridging or routing algorithm
> in WiFi stack.
> For each AP in sight an interface is created, and then it can be used as
> convenient in each case, bridging, routing etc.
> Those interfaces could be simply bridged in a trivial topology (which happens
> automatically if wds_bridge is not an empty string), or feeded to a
> routing daemon.

What's the current state of this effort? This patch is clearly not ready
to be included since it breaks existing functionality (e.g., hostapd
crashing due to NULL pointer dereferencing in i802_set_wds_sta() due to
ifname_wds == NULL with ap_wds_sta test case) and has TODO comments
implying that this is not really complete.

Is this mechanism defined somewhere? This seems to be adding new WDS
STAs based on received Beacon frames without any kind of authentication
or security which seems like a completely unrealistic deployment model
due to how open it would be against various attacks. To be frank, claims
about this being a "more useful successor" to Wi-Fi EasyMesh do not
really help in making this something that one should consider seriously.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA