• Jouni Malinen's avatar
    nl80211: Add MLME primitives to support external SME · 636a5d36
    Jouni Malinen authored
    This patch adds new nl80211 commands to allow user space to request
    authentication and association (and also deauthentication and
    disassociation). The commands are structured to allow separate
    authentication and association steps, i.e., the interface between
    kernel and user space is similar to the MLME SAP interface in IEEE
    802.11 standard and an user space application takes the role of the
    SME.
    
    The patch introduces MLME-AUTHENTICATE.request,
    MLME-{,RE}ASSOCIATE.request, MLME-DEAUTHENTICATE.request, and
    MLME-DISASSOCIATE.request primitives. The authentication and
    association commands request the actual operations in two steps
    (assuming the driver supports this; if not, separate authentication
    step is skipped; this could end up being a separate "connect"
    command).
    
    The initial implementation for mac80211 uses the current
    net/mac80211/mlme.c for actual sending and processing of management
    frames and the new nl80211 commands will just stop the current state
    machine from moving automatically from authentication to association.
    Future cleanup may move more of the MLME operations into cfg80211.
    
    The goal of this design is to provide more control of authentication and
    association process to user space without having to move the full MLME
    implementation. This should be enough to allow IEEE 802.11r FT protocol
    and 802.11s SAE authentication to be implemented. Obviously, this will
    also bring the extra benefit of not having to use WEXT for association
    requests with mac80211. An example implementation of a user space SME
    using the new nl80211 commands is available for wpa_supplicant.
    
    This patch is enough to get IEEE 802.11r FT protocol working with
    over-the-air mechanism (over-the-DS will need additional MLME
    primitives for handling the FT Action frames).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJouni Malinen <j@w1.fi>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohn W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
    636a5d36
ieee80211.h 39.2 KB