Hi!
I am happy to read from you, there have been progress about this patch
indeed, I haven't reported here because I interpreted not receiving
comments except for space/tab indentation as a lack of interest, but you
bringing again this thread to life of course changed my mind
continuing in line
On 2024-12-30 10:48, Jouni Malinen wrote:
On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 06:31:16PM +0200, gio@xxxxxxxxxxxx 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.
As said before there have been progress, one of them fixing the crash
you noticed too, you can take a look of current status here
https://gitlab.com/g10h4ck/hostap/-/commit/6bb15f81e6857989c0b722fc1a49275492114148
Is this mechanism defined somewhere? This seems to be adding new WDS
STAs based on received Beacon frames
Yeah it is basically that, there is no formal specification yet, but a
wall of text explaining what it is and how this idea came out
https://github.com/G10h4ck/lime-packages/tree/lime_curtigghio/packages/lime-curtigghio#readme
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.
Yeah no proper authentication or encryption implemented yet, not an
immediate problem in my use-case.
We do use plain open AP which is included in hostapd since eons ;-)
But sure I am interested and have been participating in discussions on
implementing authentication and encryption that make sense in this kind
of setup, if you think implementing this might convince you to merge
this into hostapd, I can give priority to this too. What kind of
mechanisms (preferably reusing already existent code) would you suggest
to explore first?
For now I was more interested into getting informed opinions from people
(like you) that have much more experience in hostapd code then me.
Cheers
G10h4ck
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