Developers' documentation for wpa_supplicant

0.5.x

wpa_supplicant is a WPA Supplicant for Linux, BSD and Windows with support for WPA and WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i / RSN). Supplicant is the IEEE 802.1X/WPA component that is used in the client stations. It implements key negotiation with a WPA Authenticator and it can optionally control roaming and IEEE 802.11 authentication/association of the wlan driver.

The goal of this documentation and comments in the source code is to give enough information for other developers to understand how wpa_supplicant has been implemented, how it can be modified, how new drivers can be supported, and how wpa_supplicant can be ported to other operating systems. If any information is missing, feel free to contact Jouni Malinen <[email protected]> for more information. Contributions as patch files are also very welcome at the same address. Please note that wpa_supplicant is licensed under dual license, GPLv2 or BSD at user's choice. All contributions to wpa_supplicant are expected to use compatible licensing terms.

The source code and read-only access to wpa_supplicant CVS repository is available from the project home page at http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/. This developers' documentation is also available as a PDF file from http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-devel.pdf .

The design goal for wpa_supplicant was to use hardware, driver, and OS independent, portable C code for all WPA functionality. The source code is divided into separate C files as shown on the code structure page. All hardware/driver specific functionality is in separate files that implement a well-defined driver API. Information about porting to different target boards and operating systems is available on the porting page.

EAPOL (IEEE 802.1X) state machines are implemented as a separate module that interacts with EAP peer implementation. In addition to programs aimed at normal production use, wpa_supplicant source tree includes number of testing and development tools that make it easier to test the programs without having to setup a full test setup with wireless cards. These tools can also be used to implement automatic test suites.

wpa_supplicant implements a control interface that can be used by external programs to control the operations of the wpa_supplicant daemon and to get status information and event notifications. There is a small C library that provides helper functions to facilitate the use of the control interface. This library can also be used with C++.

wpa_supplicant modules

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