Subject: Re: Hidden SSID's

From: Jouni Malinen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:08:41 -0800

On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 10:52:20PM -0600, Larry Finger wrote:

> When an AP has a hidden SSID, ieee80211 fails, at least with wpa_supplicant,
> which searches through the scan data looking for a particular ssid. Because
> ieee80211 has substituted a false ssid, namely "<hidden>", wpa_supplicant
> cannot authenticate. This behavior is fixed by adding a new argument to
> ieee80211_translate_scan that contains the expected ssid.

Would this be replacing the SSID of all BSSes in scan results with the
SSID for which the latest per-SSID scan was issued? If yes, this does
not sound any better than the current behavior. The driver/802.11 code
should not replace the SSID value with anything else than the value
received from the AP.

In case of hidden SSIDs, the 802.11 implementation should maintain a
list of BSSes found during the scan(s) and update the SSID (in most
cases, by creating a new BSS entry) with the SSID from Probe Response
frames. In other words, if the scan is done for a specific SSID (Probe
Request includes that SSID), the AP that is using hidden SSIDs will
likely include the SSID in Probe Response and data from that Probe
Response can be used to fill in the missing pieces for the <BSSID,SSID>
pair.

Generating false scan results by locally guessing what the SSID
could be is just plain wrong. The scan results need to be based on real
frames from the APs.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA