802.11W Management Frame Protection support

[Eric Branson <bransone ecs csus edu>]

Hello,

I am trying to get NetworkManager to allow passing the "ieee80211w" option to wpa_supplicant to enable 802.11W Management Frame Protection (MFP). The 802.11W amendments are included in all amended versions of 802.11 after it, including 802.11N. It solves some major security weaknesses in the protocol, like spoofed disassociate messages, and support has been included in wpa_supplicant since 0.5.6 and was finalized in 0.7.0.

I have seen nm-device-wifi.c:build_supplicant_config(), but I don't know from where that is called, when, etc., or how the configuration is subsequently bestowed on wpa_supplicant. Can someone explain it? It would be great if someone could explain the code path, but a patch would be great too. ;)

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Eric Branson
California State University, Sacramento