Maxime Bizon wrote:
On Sat, 2006-02-25 at 16:14 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Note wrote:
Hi,
Obviously Intel doesn't want to manufacture one chipset for each subtle
difference in legislation in each and every country it sells its chips
in : Intel wants flexibility.
As pointed out by Jan, the binary approach does not solve anything for
this. If any binary exists that make the card ok for French frequencies,
I can use it (likely without even noticing) in the US where they may be
illegal.
Additionally, there seems to be a market for selling wifi devices to
companies which have a licence for some special frequencies. Atheros
hardware is used for such usage, and Intersil devices have output power
calibration data for *very strange* freqs, for instance. You can't
manufacture special chipsets in this case either. Big costumers want
flexibility.
For this part, the problem does exist. Also we can imagine more channels
may be allowed tomorrow, and it would be nice to be able to use your
existing hardware on them.
So for this, how about having part of the chip register space protected
by a HMAC ?
Say Intel burns one or more secret keys in their chip, which are used to
calculate a keyed-hash value of a set of sensitive registers. The value
is compared to another register which has to be filled by the driver,
and the chip only accepts new frequency parameters if values match.
They then can give full specs, even on the radio part, plus a set of
radio registers values and their associated hash for all legal
frequencies the chip is allowed to use.
Would a new set of frequency become allowed later, they just need to
publish the hash value to make the chip accept it. And if they want to
allow a private customer to use non common settings, they can give the
value under NDA.
The keywords for the US FCC are "Software Defined Radio" some data is in:
http://www.fcc.gov/oet/sptf_files/IEEE.pdf
New flexible FCC equipment authorization rules for software-defined or
“smart” radios permitted by the
FCC under certain conditions
Radio must meet authentication/security requirements for re-programming
Proposed software changes must be authorized by original
equipment grantee who is responsible for compliance
Each hardware/software combination that can impact the
frequency, modulation, or power must be tested
Also, I heard that Japan is even more restrictive.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
