[PATCH] Implement APuP Access Point Micro Peering

[nick]

I wanted to highlight that this is already included as part of OpenWrt:

- 
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=e80520197c9ca7bced50d3605d6baba6dead6e35
- 
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=1a288670d99012e2921c2a8906e7a61dc8e89e72

Additionally, I see a wide range of use cases for this feature. While 
encryption is a great enhancement, it isn't strictly necessary in many 
scenarios.

On 12/30/24 10:48 AM, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> 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.
>