(side-reply as direct reply is either in cool-down or limited due to depth)
Interesting, I hadn't really looked into 802.11alphabetsoup in terms of ad-hoc vs infrastructure -- wasn't aware the ap was a bottleneck. The natural next question is if there are any standard secure forms for ad-hoc networking?
It would seem that shared-secret should be easy enough (but probably with the same/similar security issues as other shared-media networks in addition to the possibility of guessing the key). Some form of certificate authentication, or kerberos like shared-secret-trusted-mediator should be possible? But having a look around, I can't seem to find any - certainly not any that could be expected to work with standard OSs and devices...?
I suppose one could simply use an unsecured ad-hoc network + vpn for routing? Still I don't know of any VPN-styles that would allow broadcast traffic over such a mesh network?
Interesting, I hadn't really looked into 802.11alphabetsoup in terms of ad-hoc vs infrastructure -- wasn't aware the ap was a bottleneck. The natural next question is if there are any standard secure forms for ad-hoc networking?
It would seem that shared-secret should be easy enough (but probably with the same/similar security issues as other shared-media networks in addition to the possibility of guessing the key). Some form of certificate authentication, or kerberos like shared-secret-trusted-mediator should be possible? But having a look around, I can't seem to find any - certainly not any that could be expected to work with standard OSs and devices...?
I suppose one could simply use an unsecured ad-hoc network + vpn for routing? Still I don't know of any VPN-styles that would allow broadcast traffic over such a mesh network?
[edit: It would appear the olpc projects has done some work in this area: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Security
ed2, also: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details
And: https://github.com/cozybit/open80211s/wiki/HOWTO ]