Hello. Please forgive me if I say something stupid, I am not overly
familiar
with low-level Linux networking or hostap.
I have been playing around with a project by the name of Vanilla, which
allows a Linux device to act as a gamepad (controller for the Wii U).
The Wii U
gamepad connects to the console over Wi-Fi, however (to the best of my
knowledge) it authenticates with a PTK rotated by three bytes. Of
course,
wpa_supplicant has no API to specify this (why would it?), and so
Vanilla uses a
fork of [hostap](https://github.com/rolandoislas/drc-hostap), which is
out of
date. This situation is not ideal, as it means Vanilla must spawn of a
process
as root to manage wpa_supplicant, and fend off other wireless manager
daemons on
the system.
The aforementioned fork implements a compile-time config option to
switch
between support for Wii Us and... everything else; obviously this is not
upstreamable, and even if it is, it is still not much more practical
than the
current situation: you need two separate builds of wpa_supplicant. If
there were
to be support in hostap, it would likely need to have an API which
could then be
forwarded by NetworkManager, or be able to detect if an AP is of this
weird type
(which I believe would just involve checking for some attribute
specific to
Wii U APs).
So, that brings me to some questions for the maintainers (or really
just anyone
who is familiar with hostap development):
- Would support for byte rotated PTKs ever be accepted in upstream
hostap,
whatever method it is (e.g. compile-time config, API to specify PTK
rotations,
auto-detect based on MAC address, etc.)
- Which method would be the most practical to implement?
- Would the auto-detect method be accepted if it requires checking for
a vendor-
specific attribute? I ask because I assume most software wants to
remain
"vendor-neutral," though I guess then wpa_supplicant probably already
has
plenty of vendor-specific workarounds for buggy access points.
Thanks in advance, again please forgive me if something I've said is
totally
ridiculous, or if I've broken some mailing-list etiquette.
Daniel
P.S. I should also mention that the fork has changes to hostapd which
allow it
to act as an access point for the gamepad to connect to, but that isn't
within
the scope of Vanilla hence why I haven't mentioned that.
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