Questions with wep keys for WinXP

Haidong Xia hdxia1 at hotmail.com
Mon Jun 23 22:39:47 EDT 2003


Hi, Jouni, Thank you very much for the help.

Now, if I turn both of broadcast_key, and individual key on, and have the 
workaround set to 1, my Exp
setup works prefect.

I tried another way also. If I turn the individual key on, and default wep 
key off.  WinXP only receives
the unicast key after authentication succeeds. This is what I expected. But 
WinXP client CAN NOT get
an ip address through DHCP.  Since a DHCP request is a broadcast, I doubt if 
something is wrong with the broadcast key.

So, if WinXP doesn't receive a broadcast key, will it use the only unicast 
key to encrypt a DHCP request?
How will the hostAP handle this ?

Thanks for any point.
Haidong

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 02:16:42PM +0000, Haidong Xia wrote:

>I feel very confused with the broadcast, and unicast key.  In hostapd.conf 
>file, it says you need to set the WinXp work around.  If hostap sends both 
>broadcast, and unicast keys to WinXP, the work-around will make the two 
>keys as unicast keys, when WinXP receives them.

Please re-read the comment about the workaround.. It is needed _only_ if
you are not using individual keys. Enabling both broadcast and unicast
keys is enough to make WinXP Supplicant happy with the EAPOL-Key
packets.

>The question is how WinXP which key is used for broadcast, and which is 
>used for unicast.

There is a flag in key_index field of the EAPOL-Key telling whether the
key is broadcast (default key) or unicast (key mapping key).

--
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA

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