Re: No way to cancel SAE after CMD_AUTHENTICATE?

[James Prestwood <prestwoj@gmail.com>]

Hi Johannes,

On 3/28/24 9:05 AM, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-03-28 at 08:23 -0700, James Prestwood wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I noticed some odd behavior where userspace is unable to cancel an SAE
>> connection until associated. If you issue a CMD_AUTHENTICATE then
>> immediately (or prior to association) send a CMD_DISCONNECT the kernel
>> will not cancel the authentication and afaict ignore the CMD_DISCONNECT.
>> The kernel will continue to send authenticate events, and even retry
>> authentication until the retry limit after CMD_DISCONNECT is issued.
>>
>> I see the checks in cfg80211_disconnect which seem to back up this
>> behavior where its essentially ignored if not "connected". I'm not sure
>> where to actually fix this since the auth retries are internal to
>> mac80211. Since the device isn't even authenticated I'm unsure what
>> value/structure to even check in order to detect this situation and
>> clean up. But there needs to be some way to cancel the authentication,
>> right?
> NL80211_CMD_DEAUTHENTICATE should do that? I'm not really surprised you
> cannot disconnet when you're not even connected yet, for the most part
> the kernel doesn't care about tracking auth state (any more, for many
> years now).

Your right, I did try that so I thought but I must have screwed up the 
test. Swapping the CMD_DISCONNECT call with CMD_DEAUTHENTICATE does stop 
the retry attempts, and in turn get an expected deauth event. Sorry for 
the noise.

Thanks,

James

>
> johannes