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Patch "mac80211: don't parse encrypted management frames in ieee80211_frame_acked" has been added to the 3.18-stable tree

PATCH [email protected] 1 participant 1 message Mar 22, 2018

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This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

mac80211: don't parse encrypted management frames in ieee80211_frame_acked

to the 3.18-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:

     mac80211-don-t-parse-encrypted-management-frames-in-ieee80211_frame_acked.patch

and it can be found in the queue-3.18 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

Quoted 1 line

From foo@baz Thu Mar 22 15:16:04 CET 2018

From: Emmanuel Grumbach <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2017 10:58:51 +0300
Subject: mac80211: don't parse encrypted management frames in ieee80211_frame_acked

From: Emmanuel Grumbach <[email protected]>

[ Upstream commit cf147085fdda044622973a12e4e06f1c753ab677 ]

ieee80211_frame_acked is called when a frame is acked by the peer. In case this is a management frame, we check if this an SMPS frame, in which case we can update our antenna configuration.

When we parse the management frame we look at the category in case it is an action frame. That byte sits after the IV in case the frame was encrypted. This means that if the frame was encrypted, we basically look at the IV instead of looking at the category. It is then theorically possible that we think that an SMPS action frame was acked where really we had another frame that was encrypted.

Since the only management frame whose ack needs to be tracked is the SMPS action frame, and that frame is not a robust management frame, it will never be encrypted. The easiest way to fix this problem is then to not look at frames that were encrypted.

---
 net/mac80211/status.c |    1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
net/mac80211/status.c +1 -0
@@ -194,6 +194,7 @@ static void ieee80211_frame_acked(struct
 	}
 
 	if (ieee80211_is_action(mgmt->frame_control) &&
+	    !ieee80211_has_protected(mgmt->frame_control) &&
 	    mgmt->u.action.category == WLAN_CATEGORY_HT &&
 	    mgmt->u.action.u.ht_smps.action == WLAN_HT_ACTION_SMPS &&
 	    ieee80211_sdata_running(sdata)) {

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-3.18/mac80211-don-t-parse-encrypted-management-frames-in-ieee80211_frame_acked.patch