One of the issues that I would like to see addressed in the crypto API is they way the cipher abstraction is used. In general, a cipher should never be used directly, and so it would be much better to clean up the existing uses of ciphers outside of the crypto subsystem itself, so that we can make the cipher abstraction part of the internal API, only to be used by templates or crypto drivers that require them as a callback. As a first step, this series moves all users of the 'arc4' cipher to the ecb(arc4) skcipher, which happens to be implemented by the same driver, and is already a stream cipher, given that ARC4_BLOCK_SIZE actually evaluates to 1. Next step would be to switch the users of the 'des' and 'aes' ciphers to other interfaces that are more appropriate, either ecb(...) or a library interface, which may be more appropriate in some cases. In any case, the end result should be that ciphers are no longer used outside of crypto/ and drivers/crypto/ This series is presented as an RFC, since I am mostly interested in discussing the above, but I prefer to do so in the context of actual patches rather than an abstract discussion. Ard Biesheuvel (3): net/mac80211: switch to skcipher interface for arc4 lib80211/tkip: switch to skcipher interface for arc4 lib80211/wep: switch to skcipher interface for arc4 net/mac80211/ieee80211_i.h | 6 +- net/mac80211/key.h | 1 + net/mac80211/tkip.c | 8 +- net/mac80211/tkip.h | 4 +- net/mac80211/wep.c | 81 +++++++++++++++----- net/mac80211/wep.h | 4 +- net/mac80211/wpa.c | 4 +- net/wireless/lib80211_crypt_tkip.c | 61 ++++++++++----- net/wireless/lib80211_crypt_wep.c | 52 +++++++++---- 9 files changed, 153 insertions(+), 68 deletions(-) -- 2.20.1