Re: [PATCH 14/15] wifi: mac80211: Use AES-CMAC library in ieee80211_aes_cmac()

[Eric Biggers]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 12:00:03PM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Wed, 2026-02-18 at 13:35 -0800, Eric Biggers wrote:
> > Now that AES-CMAC has a library API, convert the mac80211 AES-CMAC
> > packet authentication code to use it instead of a "cmac(aes)"
> > crypto_shash.  This has multiple benefits, such as:
> > 
> > - It's faster.  The AES-CMAC code is now called directly, without
> >   unnecessary overhead such as indirect calls.
> > 
> > - MAC calculation can no longer fail.
> > 
> > - The AES-CMAC key struct is now a fixed size, allowing it to be
> >   embedded directly into 'struct ieee80211_key' rather than using a
> >   separate allocation.  Note that although this increases the size of
> >   the 'u.cmac' field of 'struct ieee80211_key', it doesn't cause it to
> >   exceed the size of the largest variant of the union 'u'.  Therefore,
> >   the size of 'struct ieee80211_key' itself is unchanged.
> > 
> 
> Looks good to me in principle, I suppose we should test it? :)

Yes, I don't expect any issues, but testing of this patch would be
appreciated.  I don't know how to test every kernel subsystem.

> > +		err = aes_cmac_preparekey(&key->u.aes_cmac.key, key_data,
> > +					  key_len);
> > +		if (err) {
> >  			kfree(key);
> >  			return ERR_PTR(err);
> >  		}
> 
> Pretty sure that can't fail, per the documentation for
> aes_prepareenckey() and then aes_cmac_preparekey(), but it doesn't
> really matter. We can only get here with a key with size checked by
> cfg80211_validate_key_settings() already.

aes_cmac_preparekey() indeed always succeeds when passed a valid key
length, as documented in its kerneldoc.  But in this case I recommend
just checking the error code anyway, since ieee80211_key_alloc() can
already fail for other reasons (i.e., it needs the ability to report
errors anyway) and the key length isn't a compile-time constant here.

> Since you're probably going to send it through the crypto tree:
> 
> Acked-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

For library conversions like this I've usually been taking the library
itself through libcrypto-next, then sending the subsystem conversions
afterwards for subsystem maintainers to take in the next release.  But
I'd also be glad to just take this alongside the library itself.

- Eric