wpa_supplicant is a WPA Supplicant for Linux, BSD, and Windows with support for WPA and WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i / RSN). It is suitable for both desktop/laptop computers and embedded systems. 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 controls the roaming and IEEE 802.11 authentication/association of the wlan driver.

wpa_supplicant is designed to be a "daemon" program that runs in the background and acts as the backend component controlling the wireless connection. wpa_supplicant supports separate frontend programs and a text-based frontend (wpa_cli) and a GUI (wpa_gui) are included with wpa_supplicant.

wpa_supplicant is an open source program that is freely available with community support through a mailing list. If you are looking for a commercial version with additional functionality and support, please take a look at commercial support options.

wpa_supplicant uses a flexible build configuration that can be used to select which features are included. This allows minimal code size (from ca. 50 kB binary for WPA/WPA2-Personal and 130 kB binary for WPA/WPA2-Enterprise without debugging code to 450 kB with most features and full debugging support; these example sizes are from a build for x86 target).

Supported WPA/IEEE 802.11i features

• WPA-PSK ("WPA-Personal")
• WPA with EAP (e.g., with RADIUS authentication server) ("WPA-Enterprise")
• key management for CCMP, TKIP, WEP104, WEP40
• WPA and full IEEE 802.11i/RSN/WPA2
• RSN: PMKSA caching, pre-authentication

Supported EAP methods (IEEE 802.1X Supplicant)

• EAP-TLS
• EAP-PEAP/MSCHAPv2 (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-PEAP/TLS (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-PEAP/GTC (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-PEAP/OTP (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-PEAP/MD5-Challenge (both PEAPv0 and PEAPv1)
• EAP-TTLS/EAP-MD5-Challenge
• EAP-TTLS/EAP-GTC
• EAP-TTLS/EAP-OTP
• EAP-TTLS/EAP-MSCHAPv2
• EAP-TTLS/EAP-TLS
• EAP-TTLS/MSCHAPv2
• EAP-TTLS/MSCHAP
• EAP-TTLS/PAP
• EAP-TTLS/CHAP
• EAP-SIM
• EAP-AKA
• EAP-PSK (experimental)
• EAP-FAST
• EAP-PAX
• EAP-SAKE (experimental)
• EAP-GPSK (experimental)
• LEAP (note: requires special support from the driver)

Following methods are also supported, but since they do not generate keying material, they cannot be used with WPA or IEEE 802.1X WEP keying.

• EAP-MD5-Challenge
• EAP-MSCHAPv2
• EAP-GTC
• EAP-OTP

More information about EAP methods and interoperability testing is available in eap_testing.txt.

Supported TLS/crypto libraries

• OpenSSL (default)
• GnuTLS

Internal TLS/crypto implementation (optional)

• can be used in place of an external TLS/crypto library
• TLSv1
• X.509 certificate processing
• PKCS #1
• ASN.1
• RSA
• bignum
• minimal size (ca. 50 kB binary, parts of which are already needed for WPA; TLSv1/X.509/ASN.1/RSA/bignum parts are about 25 kB on x86)

Supported wireless cards/drivers

• Linux drivers that support Linux Wireless Extensions v19 or newer with WPA/WPA2 extensions
• Host AP driver for Prism2/2.5/3 (WPA and WPA2)
• Linuxant DriverLoader with Windows NDIS driver supporting WPA/WPA2
• Agere Systems Inc. Linux Driver (Hermes-I/Hermes-II chipset) (WPA, but not WPA2)
• madwifi (Atheros ar521x)
• ATMEL AT76C5XXx
• Linux ndiswrapper
• Broadcom wl.o driver
• Intel ipw2100
• Intel ipw2200
• Wired Ethernet drivers
• BSD net80211 layer (e.g., Atheros driver) (FreeBSD 6-CURRENT and NetBSD current)
• Windows NDIS drivers (Windows; at least XP and 2000, others not tested)

wpa_supplicant was designed to be portable for different drivers and operating systems. Hopefully, support for more wlan cards and OSes will be added in the future. See developers' documentation for more information about the design of wpa_supplicant and porting to other drivers.

Download

wpa_supplicant
Copyright (c) 2003-2006, Jouni Malinen <jkmaline@cc.hut.fi> and contributors.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. See COPYING for more details.

Alternatively, this software may be distributed, used, and modified under the terms of BSD license.

Please see README for the current documentation.
README-Windows.txt has some more information about the Windows port of wpa_supplicant.

• Release graph
• Latest stable release:
  • wpa_supplicant-0.4.9.tar.gz (source code for all versions)
  • wpa_supplicant-windows-bin-0.4.9.zip (binaries for Windows)
• Older stable release:
  • wpa_supplicant-0.3.11.tar.gz (source code for all versions)
  • wpa_supplicant-windows-bin-0.3.11.zip (binaries for Windows)
• Obsolete stable release
  (note: 0.2.x branch is not supported anymore - please upgrade to 0.3.x or 0.4.x):
  • wpa_supplicant-0.2.8.tar.gz
• Latest development release:
  • wpa_supplicant-0.5.6.tar.gz
  • wpa_supplicant-windows-bin-0.5.6.zip (binaries for Windows)
• ChangeLog:
  • development branch
  • stable branch
• Old releases
• Mailing list
• New mailing list archives
• Web interface to CVS repository
• Snapshot releases from all active branches
• Read-only anonymous CVS access (pserver)
• Bug and feature request tracking
• Developers' documentation for wpa_supplicant 0.5.x
• Developers' documentation for wpa_supplicant 0.4.x
• wpa_gui screenshots