A change to 802.11 to provide privacy without authentication
was proposed to TGmc in the closing ballots of P802.11REVmc.
This was called opportunistic wireless encryption (OWE).
TGmc debated this change at length, and decided not to
incorporate it.
The proponents of that mechanism obtained permission by an
802.11 WG motion to get numbers allocated from
the 802.11 ANA to support a specification of OWE in IETF.
These numbers were duly allocated and are in the posted
ANA database.
Dan Harkins and Warren Kumari have produced an IETF draft,
see:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-harkins-owe/
They are
soliciting review and comment as widely as possible.
I suspect the topic of incorporating OWE into the 802.11
standard will be re-opened in the next revision. Therefore,
those
with an interest in this mechanism might want to review the
IETF draft so that any technical changes/corrections are
incorporated as soon as possible.
The datatracker indicates the draft is "In Last Call - ends
2017-01-13". If you have comments, please provide them
to: iesg@xxxxxxxx,
draft-harkins-owe-all@xxxxxxxx, and secdir@xxxxxxxx
before that date.
Best Regards,
Adrian Stephens
IEEE 802.11 Working Group Chair
mailto: adrian.p.stephens@xxxxxxxx
Phone: +1 (971) 203-2032
Skype: adrian_stephens