[Olsr-users] High-level questions about encryption on OLSR ad-hoc mesh

[Ben West]

Hi Henning,

Thank you for the responses.  I was indeed looking into attaching
VPN-capable boxes at wired points on the mesh to create encrypted tunnels
where necessary, not only because the firmware stack I'm using (OpenWRT +
ath9k) doesn't appear to support encryption in ad-hoc at present, but also
because I would expect such encryption to take a heavy toll on the little
400MHz CPUs of the access points.

Please see my follow-up question below about olsr-secure ...

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:28 AM, Henning Rogge <
(spam-protected)> wrote:

> On Tue March 1 2011 06:49:13 Ben West wrote:
> > First off, a low-level question ...
> >
> > Is any information available about the key (type, content, length) used
> by
> > the olsr-secure plugin?  I see that the module exists in v0.6 of OLSR,
> but
> > I can't find any documentation about how to generate the key file.  Also,
> > am I correct in undestanding that his plugin basically works to prevent
> > route spoofing by an untrusted node, but not to actually encrypt mesh
> > traffic?
> The secure plugin does not encrypt the traffic of the mesh at all, its just
> a
> group-key based signature system for the OLSR packets. The key has to be
> supplied in a textfile.
>
>
Are there requirements on the key in this text file, or is it arbitrary?

I.e. could it be any sequence of characters, ideally of some non-trivial
length and with decent entropy?  E.g. an MD5 hash of the current UNIX time?

-- 
Ben West
(spam-protected)
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