On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 03:00:58PM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

> ESSIDs can technically include NULL characters.  Drivers should not be
> adjusting the length of the ESSID before reporting it in their
> SIOCGIWESSID handlers.  Breaks stuff like wpa_supplicant.  Note that ipw
> drivers, which seem to currently be the "most correct", don't have this
> problem.

I'm still trying to go through the huge amount of email I've received
during two-week time travelling and noticed this one just now. I did not
see any discussion about this on netdev list, but I believe the change
here is changes the WE user space interface and this has not been done
previously in order to not break user space programs.

I agree that the choice of SSID len+1 is unfortunate for a data
structure that is not really a string but array of octets. However, that
was the way SIOCGIWESSID/SIOCSIWESSID was designed if I have understood
correctly (Jean cc'ed just in case).

Is this change, if applied (or was it already applied?), an indication
that we are now changing the WE interface in a way that is not
backwards compatible and we are willing to break an existing kernel-user
space interface?

Actually, wpa_supplicant started using real SSID length, but was changed
in September 2004 to use len+1 after Jean explained what the
SIOCSIWESSID was designed to do..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
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