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. -- Maxime - 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
