diff mbox series

[v5,16/16] hostapd: Extended Key ID stress test

Message ID 20190825163521.22625-17-alexander@wetzel-home.de
State Superseded
Headers show
Series Support seamless PTK rekeys with Extended Key ID | expand

Commit Message

Alexander Wetzel Aug. 25, 2019, 4:35 p.m. UTC 
Change the default keyid to 1 for the first pairwise key when using
Extended Key ID. This is so far only intended to cause compatibility
problems as soon as possible and not delay them depending on the rekey
interval.
A broken STA may claim to be compatible with Extended Key ID and will
simply assume keyid 0 for each key install.

Instead of causing connection problems after the first rekey we move
these to the initial connect by starting with the more risky keyid 1.

Signed-off-by: Alexander Wetzel <alexander@wetzel-home.de>
---

For now this is has mainly two functions:
1) Guarantees that Extended Key ID can really be used at the initial
   connect. Many potential issues are linked to the usage of keyid 1
   for a unicast key, so make sure this happens as soon as possible.

2) The existing tests will find many of these issues, even when not
   rekeying the connection

I have some plans to extend that later:
By e.g. starting a EAPOL group handshake directly after the connect we
can verify if the keyid 1 transport is really working. When the
handshake times out hostapd could install the same key for keyid 0,
disabling Extended Key ID support and allow the broken STA to work with
the AP.

This idea is mostly based to the fact that one of my devices (Samsung
Galaxy Tap S3) is setting the "Extended Key ID" capability flag wrong.
The AP therefore (correctly) assumes the device can handle it. When the
AP rekeys the PTK and uses the keyid 1 the device is losing the
connection.  It looks like the device is just copying the capability
(bit) from the AP RSN. Chances are this affects more (Samsung) devices.

Now I'm not sure if we really want to deploy such a workaround. It's
probably hard to get rid of and just getting the broken devices fixed
may be the better solution. Of course the workaround would be optional:
I think we could set wpa_extended_key_id to 2 by default and allow the
user to disable the workaround by setting it to 1.

Another option would be to simply drop the patch or make it testing only.
After all PTK rekeying is - based on all devices I could get my hands on
- mostly broken. The chance to have an AP and a STA able to rekey really
correctly under load is as of today really bad. (Maybe 20% success rate?)
Therefore it looks like rekey is not used very often and when we start
with keyid 0 and never rekey it will also work for most users.

On the other hand I prefer a clean failure to something working on the
brink of failure: So this patch series tries to make sure it fails as
soon as possible.

 src/ap/wpa_auth_ie.c | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/src/ap/wpa_auth_ie.c b/src/ap/wpa_auth_ie.c
index 725c76056..3207990e5 100644
--- a/src/ap/wpa_auth_ie.c
+++ b/src/ap/wpa_auth_ie.c
@@ -553,6 +553,7 @@  int handle_extended_key_id(struct wpa_state_machine *sm, int capabilities)
 			return -1;
 		} else if (!sm->use_extended_key_id) {
 			sm->use_extended_key_id = TRUE;
+			sm->keyidx_active = 1;
 		}
 	} else {
 		if (sm->use_extended_key_id && sm->pairwise_set) {