wpa encryption ETA?

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 09:39 -0500, Owen Williams wrote:
> Is WPA encryption planned for the olpc, and if so, what's the expected
> time for support to be included?  Most of the networks I'm on are WPA,
> and it's difficult to develop on the laptop without a network
> connection.  

Possibly, given the time...  The driver "supports" it, but that support
is completely untested with the switch to deferred association, and it's
unclear if the driver works correctly with wpa_supplicant WRT rekey
events not triggering infinite reauthentication loops.

> Alternatively, I was thinking of buying a USB ethernet adapter.  Is
> there any reason one wouldn't work on the laptop if it was supported by
> fc6?  

None whatsoever, except that the sugar nm-applet doesn't support the UI
for WPA yet.  If it did, it certainly would not support WPA[2]
Enterprise, LEAP, or Dynamic WEP options in the UI, since those
configurations are, for now, so far outside the scope of the project.
We're talking about deploying in low management situations, which do not
include any type of RADIUS :)  But plain wpa_supplicant should work
given the correct card & driver.

Mostly this is an issue of time spent where needed most (like not
hanging the box while scanning), and if there's time, WPA[2] PSK with
TKIP & AES/CCMP will be added.

For the future, it's anticipated that the infrastructure Wifi bits will
fade into the background, and not be displayed prominently in the UI at
all.  Mesh will be "always on" and you hopefully will not have to care
about associating to a normal WiFi AP too often, though the
functionality needs to be there to automatically bridge mesh and
infrastructure to provide internet access for everyone else.

Dan