WPA status 2005-12-22

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

Quick update on WPA stuff...

What's landed since Dec 14th
----------------------------

a) The conversion to security options is largely complete in both the
Gnome applet and NetworkManager core.  This enables a much more flexible
model for storage and communication of wireless network security data
like encryption keys and WEP/WPA specific data.

b) The password dialog also supports wireless security options now.

c) The applet converts old-format GConf entries to the new format on
startup.  Which means, yes, it will ask for your Keyring password the
first time you start up the applet, but should then return to previous
behavior of asking for the keyring password only when it really needs
it.

d) Conversion to WEXT constants is complete as well.  NM-specific enums
(from NetworkManager.h) that overlapped with ones
from /usr/include/wireless.h have been removed and are no longer used.

e) Key hashing code has been removed from NetworkManager, as that
functionality has been taken over by the applets.  NetworkManager now
requires all encryption keys to be in UTF-8 hexadecimal-representation
strings suitable for dumping directly to WEXT apis

f) Many, many bugs and crashers have been cleaned up over the past week,
so if you were brave enough to actually _run_ CVS HEAD, you'll probably
be able to connect to _something_ now.

g) I've tried to start some unit tests in the test/ directory, right now
they are limited to testing the cipher stuff in libnm-util.  But they've
already helped quite a bit there and I'd like to build them out further.


What's left to be done?
-----------------------

o Make the applet respect access point and device capabilities (ie,
    don't allow WPA on non-WPA-capable devices)
o Fix bugs that cause behavior different from 2 weeks ago
o Hook up WPA options in the applet
o Create a supplicant_manager object that controls invocations of
    wpa_supplicant
    o Write out correct wpa_supplicant config file and ask the
        NMAPSecurity objects to write out their security information
    o Connect to wpa_supplicant's control socket to monitor association
        status

Again, we don't actually do WPA yet, but most of the infrastructure that
simply didn't exist two weeks ago is now present.  After solidifying
more of the current code over the next few days and into next week, I'd
like to start work on the supplicant manager and actually try to plug in
wpa_supplicant.

Anyone's welcome to help out.  Some easy things to do would be:

a) make the applet respect network device and access point capabilities
so that we don't allow WPA on a non-WPA device
b) Actually hook up WPA UI options in the applet (look at the
wso-manager.c file for guidance on how the WEP options do it)
c) Or, non-WPA stuff would be fine too, of course.  Like figuring out
the whole icon theme thing so we can drop Jimmac's icons in alongside
the current set.

Dan