Re: airo and firmware upload (was Re: 2.6 must-fix list, v3)

Jean Tourrilhes (jt@bougret.hpl.hp.com)
Wed, 14 May 2003 19:20:34 -0700


On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 05:59:04PM -0700, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 07:53:31PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> > airo and HostAP do indeed need to use CryptoAPI not reimplement their
> > own crypto, though...
>
> Host AP driver has a dynamic crypto implementation that allows one to
> load new algorithms as a separate kernel modules. One of such modules
> was an interface to use CryptoAPI. However, I don't think there is a
> public release of it.
>
> Do you think WEP should be implemented as a CryptoAPI algorithm? It is a
> combination of CRC-32 and RC4 and the crypto module in Host AP does
> these together in one pass of the packet payload to minimize host CPU
> load. I'm not keen on using RC4 separately with CryptoAPI (I don't think
> it is even included yet) if that means making the WEP encryption use
> more CPU.. However, I could consider taking CryptoAPI into use it would
> support WEP as an algorithm (i.e., I could consider porting the current
> Host AP WEP code to CryptoAPI).

There is no RC4 currently in the crypto API (guess why), and I
believe that most wireless driver would be interested in the RC4+CRC,
so I would advocate for doing "WEP".

> Since I'm not that interested in maintaining multiple source trees of
> the driver, own WEP implementation is going to remain in the Host AP
> driver for 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. Anyway, this could probably be
> automatically stripped from the code if backward compatibility in
> drivers must be removed from 2.5/2.6 kernel tree.

If you define the WEP in the kernel crypto, it could even be
the exact same file.

> Jouni Malinen

Thanks...

Jean
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