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Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

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223 points stusmall | 1 comments | 28 Mar 25 13:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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jauntywundrkind ◴[28 Mar 25 18:36 UTC] No.43508632[source]▶
I really wish there were some write-ups for doing wifi-p2p aka wifi-aware (the wifi alliance's proprietary branding for it) on Linux! Incredibly sad that it's just so so so undocumented; such a neat sounding suite of capabilities.

Haven't looked in 2-3 years, but found so little ehm last I looked. Very dismaying. So many folks doing "p2p" file sharing apps, but generally they assume you have setup networking already. We really need to own the means of connectivity. Especially now!

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londons_explore ◴[28 Mar 25 19:16 UTC] No.43509017[source]▶
Unfortunately I believe it requires your WiFi firmware have the ability to switch channels with microsecond timing precision.

That means you couldn't do it with off the shelf WiFi hardware.

You might be able to do it whilst dropping existing WiFi connections during the transfer.

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1. snops ◴[28 Mar 25 19:41 UTC] No.43509220[source]▶
The article links to a Linux implementation that does it with off the shelf WiFi hardware. You do need specific features in the hardware/firmware, but there are consumer devices that have that e.g. Atheros AR9280.

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl

It currently drops connections to an AP, but the authors of the implementation seem to believe this could be fixed:

> OWL does not allow a concurrent connection to an AP. This means, that when started, the Wi-Fi interface exclusively uses AWDL. To work around this, OWL could create a new monitor interface (instead of making the Wi-Fi interface one) and adjust its channel sequence to include the channel of the AP network.