Re: [leaf-wisp] WPA support in leaf-wisp?

Vladimir Ivaschenko wrote:

> 
> To be honest I never looked into WPA. It would be nice to have, however 
> from what I understand it requires quite elaborate infrastructure on 
> both server and client end.
> 
> Also seeing how people struggle with WPA on various lists doesn't make 
> me feel it is very stable currently. :-)

To a degree, there are some difficulties with it from time to time. For 
the most part, it is well supported under the situations most people use 
it under, which is with Apple clients in OSX and Windows XP clients. No 
other Windows versions support WPA without commercial 3rd party 
utilities (that I can find anyway). Linux support is available, although 
you either have to use the hostap related utilities (Prism II cards 
only) or the Linuxant drivers (again, IIRC.). The difficulties you see 
may be people using cards with chipsets that won't support WPA in 
Linux/BSD/whatever.

This brings up the point though; we use PrismII cards so that we can 
support HostAP mode for the APs, and adding in support for the WPA 
authenticator isn't a far stretch. The same author makes the 
hostap-drivers, hostap-utils, and hostap software. He also makes the 
wpa_supplicant software and the authenticator. (Basically, its all 
there.) The catch is, you need current enough firmware on your card 
(update to 1.7.4 - quite stable IMHO), and current enough hostap-drivers 
(I use the latest release.) This is to get the WPA, TKIP, and AES 
support. I have used it successfully to connect my Linux laptop at work 
to our WPA wireless infrastructure (802.1x, PEAP/MSCHAPv2 against a 
Windoze IAS RADIUS server.)  Anyway, even support for WPA/PSK would be 
nice. WPA provides the security that WEP lacks, making it more 
attractive for "serious" installations.

I think it would be a very nice edition. And it probably wouldn't take 
much more than bumping the version of the hostap-drivers to current, 
adding in the authenticator package, and some usage notes.

On the other hand, 802.11i just took official status, didn't it? Maybe 
it would be easier to wait for compatible hardware, specs, and resources 
to hit the market. But that doesn't help those of us with existing a/b/g 
hardware... :)

DS


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