On Tue, 2018-08-28 at 18:27 +0200, Alexander Wetzel wrote: > > This seems a bit weird - we know a likely dangerous thing is happening > > and only print an info message? Why not just prevent this in the first > > place? > > The next version will upgrade that to a warning. Maybe make it rate limited, and certainly not a WARN_ON() though. > Rejecting it outright will break things for users with card/drivers > where rekey currently is working. There is no error error message for > "please re-associate as quick as you can" and tricking userspace to do > that across versions and implementations would need code at I do not see > belonging into the kernel. Here what I wrote in the cover letter of the > v4 version of the patch about this decision: > > > I do not see an acceptable way from the kernel to trigger a fast > > reconnect. wpa_supplicant e.g. has some special code handling errors > > during a 4-way-handshake differently. I assume we would have to add > > code detecting if we are running as AP, Station Infrastructure, Ad-Hoc > > or Mesh and then find and spoof an error which allows the userspace to > > reconnect fast. For multiple different userspace implementations and > > the different versions of them. > > And we'll have that mess in the kernel for basically forever... > > Seems to be a clear no go, correct? > > > > So this patch (series) is giving up on a quick fix and will allow > > broken rekeys to continue. It is instead providing an updated API for > > both the userspace and the drivers to also do it correctly. Users > > running a userspace not aware of the new API will get some > > improvements but may > > still leak cleartext packets and have connection freezes till we get > > an updated userspace rolled out. On the plus side users running > > updated userspace won't be able to rekey connections any longer, > > avoiding the issues even with unpatched kernels. > > Of course I may miss something and there may be a good way to get that > working anyhow. But for me it looks like we either have to accept > something which looks like a regression to users or accept that some > drivers may not be fixed with this patch alone and will need either an > updated userspace or drivers. Ok, fair enough. I may be willing to accept something as a regression, but at the same time perhaps it doesn't really belong into this patch anyway, so we can always do it as a later one. johannes
